05 June, 2008

Back-Chat

Another one from the archive. Here we have a krypton mini-bulb wired up to the speaker terminals of an old bang & olufsen amplifier circa 1970-ish (an old family heirloom, which is why i treat it so carefully).

The source material is F.M radio, and the gating/distortion/ring modulation is probably due to the amp not liking what it's seeing with the bulb - wildly differing impedance according to whether it's lit or not - and the bulb trying its best to keep up with the amp's complaints. Also, i'm guessing that since the power output from the bulb can't go into the negative (ie, suck light in), all of the negative signal gets mixed in with the positive, hence the ring-modulator sound. I like to think of it as a sort of audio-visual amp/speaker altercation...

(Reverb and compression added)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

clever!

is it a neon flicker-flame lamp?
: )
: )

on a related note, I tried connecting a neon sign transformer to the speaker output of a radio... the spark appeared to dance with the music but it was just a tiny mosquito-like sound...

best
EA