The Tubah is a project I made for a course called Alter Ego at the art academy in Den Haag. In Alter Ego everyone tries to analyse their own creative process. Using these ‘recipes’, all students then takes on the creative identity of another student from the group, trying to do a project in the way the other person would do it. The goal is to become more aware of the boundaries of your own methods of creation.

That’s how I came to be an electrotechnician with an interest in acoustic instruments, cannabis and noise for a few weeks. I decided to do some project with wind instruments. The end result is the Tubah. This ‘instrument’ takes its name from its most important part: a PVC tube. A transistor circuit generates white noise which is sent into the pipe through a  small amplifier and speaker. A servo motor with a robot arm, controlled by a program running on a microcontroller, changes the effective length of the tube, similar to the way a flute player produces different notes. When applied to white noise like this, the effect of a low-pass filter is obtained.

The best thing to do at this point is watch the movie below: