Most of us have an old phone collecting dust in our drawers. This isn’t at all because it’s no longer functional. Rather, it is the consequence of a market strategy called ‘planned obsolescence’, which is deployed by the ICT industry to increase the sales of newer devices by making working hardware seemingly useless. But one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
While their battery might be old, their camera depreciated, and their operating system no longer supported, smartphones are still computers with enough power to perform complex tasks. Trashing them is not only a (e-)wasted opportunity, but also a detriment to our ecosystem. What can we do with all these devices?
To open the conversation and answer this question with a concrete application, this workshop explores the possibility of creating new digital music instruments based on old smart phones.
Over two days you will learn how to repurpose old and cheap smartphones into functional synthesisers. You will go through all the steps needed, discover the joys of granular synthesis, Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition, and learn how to work with open-source software such as PostmarketOS and Pure Data. At the end of the workshop, and possibly a small attempt to play all together, you can finally go back home with your own custom synthesiser that’s too cool to stay in a drawer.