More people, more interest

So here is where things start to get more adventurous, as more voices arrive on the scene. I've obviously got a lot I want to say, but I'm recruiting more instrument makers and more CMT bloggers to make sure this site stays interesting. Today's post welcomes Sam Hernandez! No introductions, judge him by what he posts... One note though: Sam doesn't have CMT and nor will most of the instrument makers. I think this is to the benefit of the project as it will inevitably help reach more people who haven't heard about CMT before. The project is trying to build an unusual community dialogue between people that do and don't know about CMT.

INSTRUMENTS
post by Sam Hernandez

So I promised Tim I'd make an instrument for his CMT creates: music project. He's got one well underway but he's already committed to at least four and probably more. So what to make? These instruments are supposed to be experimental and made from found / scavenged material as much as possible, so the question was, what do I have that can go into making a musical instrument?

Well, one of my hobbies is electronics, and I have collected quite a large amount of stuff from taking apart various electronic gizmos. In particular, I have a big box of electric motors and a whole bunch of wire. Sounds like a good place to start:



How does one make sound with a motor? You can make the motor spin at a certain speed, and if it's loud enough you'll hear a tone that's related to the motor speed. There's plenty of examples on the internet of people doing this. It's neat, but it's not exactly visually appealing, it's kind of complicated, and it doesn't really sound that good.

My next idea was to attach something to the motor spindle and have that thing agitate a tuned object. I thought about strings, like piano strings or violin strings, but we don't have any of those around that I'd be willing to spare. Glancing around the kitchen shows what we do have: empty beer bottles and dirty dishes. So it wasn't a strain to think of hitting beer bottles with water inside, and that's what I am going with.


The green stuff in there is just water with some food coloring so you can see the water level. I was able to get eleven notes from the Corona bottles, which is pretty good, just shy of one octave. I think the shape of the bottle limits the pitches; the jump in water levels from the lowest note to the next higher one is very big, and it ends up on the other side of the bell shape of the bottle. The other notes change more gradually. For a full-fledged instrument I'll probably need a variety of shapes to get a good range.

The motors are pretty small and they don't have much torque, so whatever is attached to them can't be very big. I've been playing with a little piece of bicycle innertube taped to the motor. It's easy to get and easy to fabricate. There are some problems, but it's working ok for now.



To add a little bit of randomness to the sound, my idea is to dangle a motor directly above each bottle. The motor will bounce around the bottle, creating a quick varied rhythm. I haven't made a jig to hold the motors yet; that's the next step. The length of the wire suspending the motor will make a big difference; with a long wire the motor can bounce pretty far off the bottle, and even into the neighboring ones. That's ok for an ambient sound machine or something like a wind chime, but the idea is that this is an instrument; bouncing around into neighboring notes is a bit too random.



You can see from the video that the rubber on the end of the motor fouls up on itself at the end there. Improvements are forthcoming :) The motors could be controlled easily enough with push buttons, but I'm still thinking about the human interface to this instrument. Something that moves the wire closer to the instrument would give the player more control, but it might be tricky to have any sort of accuracy. I'll leave that for later :)

CHARCOT MARIE TOOTH
post by Tim Phillips

The Difficulty of Standing Still | Fatigue

Standing still is tricky when you have no balance. My lack of balance is mostly due to my lack of spatial awareness of my feet; they are numb to touch but also to where they are in space. I am unaware of when my foot touches the ground until the fact that it has stopped ricochets up my joints. When my foot is on uneven ground, I can’t tell if it is angled left, right, up or down. By looking at a stationary object I can tell if my body’s tipping, but I’m slow to adjust and correct my balance due to loss of signals in my periphery nerves. If I close my eyes I fall over.

I can stand still, but achieving stillness means constantly compensating for all the lack of senses listed above and that's hard work. My body is constantly making large and late corrections to maintain my balance. This is why standing is particularly hard and tiring. At least when walking I have some momentum to keep me centered. People with CMT suffer from fatigue and I think that this battle with balance is a key factor.

When I am very fatigued, firstly I need to eat. I guess the food gives me the energy to then do one of two things: One is to sleep, probably the best choice. The other, more common choice, is to try and compensate by putting even more energy into what I’m doing, a lot like a sleepy child refusing their tiredness. This is a fairly obvious stubborn reaction to my physical symptoms, but it is worth trying to be conscious of what’s happening and why.

Although it sounds contradictory, aerobic exercise really helps me counteract fatigue, as well as my AFO's (ankle foot othotics/braces) and as much rest as I allow myself.

Fatigue seems like a simple extension of tiredness, but it is far more complicated. I think that most problems with CMT either stem from it, or lead back to it. There are obvious things like balance and stamina, but also less obvious things like grieving and state of mind that I'll address later.