Yesterday myself, Marie Young and Iris Cooper took over the Big Hands music venue as part of the Whitworth Gallery Pubcrawl. We had a Brother Kh950i electronic and a KH836 punchcard machine, along with a bunch of other tools including a tenori-on sequencer, video camera, original knitting videos, metasynth 5.1, wireless mic, a garter carriage and lots of cables.
The aim of the afternoon was to present a number of experiments linking sound to knitting. Marie’s sampling of the Tenori-on interface worked really well, producing some amazing 16 stitch wide progressive patterns. We also had a number of punchcards for people to both knit a pattern repeat and programme the device with their own design.
I attempted some ambient amplification and distortion of the sounds of the knitting activities, mic-ing up the machines and running the sound through a series of fx modules in Isadora. I missed a trick by not recording and then knitting these sounds but it was one of a few ideas that came out of the day itself. I did some sequencing of my own, asking people to design 64×64 stitch designs which were then scanned and imported into Metasynth in order to produce interesting sonic samples which were then knitted on the KH950i.
We also had some live music with Nicholas James of Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces joining us on guitar to interpret a score derived from Clint Cahill’s punchcard whilst Clint himself knitted the piece. Iris knitted a waveform generated from Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, before Mary Stark knitted a spectrograph of a tune by Teebs to finish off the afternoon.Cheers to Big Hands for hosting and to Ed Watts of Whitworth for organising.