#009 – John Richards & Agnes Cameron – Critical Sound Synthesis – MORE ROAR!

John Richards (Dirty Electronics) and Agnes Cameron discuss the recent collaboration MORE ROAR!, a digital synthesiser built using a tiny microprocessor. It explores what we call ‘critical sound synthesis’ that follows in the critical design and critical making line of thought. A synthesis that extends beyond sound itself to open-up reflection on technology and society. It builds on our interests in Dirty Electronics, collaborative making and sound activism.

Themes that emerge include consumer culture, feature creep, information overload, and excess and waste, waste at a material and resource level. And noise and disorder, and technological- and self-determinism.These themes have been further explored through the idea of entropy, broadly, inner transformations, decay and surprise. The synth is entropic. The more you play it, the more its sounds degrade, become re-ordered. Every restart, a different rate of degradation. ‘Raw’ sound weathered into noise and silence. We also consider this a form of ‘idio-synthesis’, digital sound synthesis at a material-like level that focuses on the idiosyncrasies and limits of a specific chip.