For my final Interface Lab project, I created a new instrument called breakerbox. It’s a wireless MIDI controller sending X/Y-axis orientation as control change messages, along with one momentary button, one endless rotary encoder, one A/B/AB crossfade-type toggle, and one regular toggle. It's also (in this incarnation) a freeform breakbeat transmogrifier!
Background: one of my first recurring professional gigs as a musician was a weekly residency at an open breakdance event called Fat Caps and Shell Toes. I was in an instrumental band that played for dancers from all over to practice, perform, battle, and learn from each other. This night was my introduction to breaking culture and I got hooked on the friendly but fierce competition, the incredible movement and acrobatics, plus the infectious blend of funk, disco, rock, Latin, and electronic music that underpins it.
Breaking is a form of street dance that originated in the 1970’s in the Bronx, largely by Black and Puerto Rican dancers. It’s usually performed solo or in a one-on-one “battle”, or one at a time in competitive group called a “cypher”. The key to understanding breaking musically is the concept of breakbeat — that section of funk, soul and disco records, usually at or near the climax, where the band and vocalists drop out and let the drums and percussion play for a short amount of time (usually to build tension). DJs like Kool Herc discovered that you can maintain that level of peak energy and prolong the resolution of the rhythmic tension by extending those breakbeat sections of the original records (initially, by switching back and forth between two copies of the vinyl record — later, by sampling those sections into digital sampling machines and playing them back ad infinitum as a digital loop.)
Breaking as an art form and a culture became closely tied to breakbeats, and to the records that contained them. Over time, those specific records became enshrined as standard repertoire for breaking, and the breakbeats themselves became a vocabulary and language unto itself. Later, in the 80’s and 90’s, that language was extended to encompass new genres of original music, like hip-hop, drum ‘n’ bass, and jungle.
For breakerbox, I imagined a hand-held gadget or instrument that allows the user to playfully explore two standard breaks from the breaking repertoire, and to use a combination of traditional controls (knobs and switches) and natural gestures (tilt and roll) to transform and modify the music in real-time. I wanted everyone to share the infectious joy and excitement of breakbeats and the discovery of how they have been manipulated over the years in various forms of music.
Many years ago, I had used an iOS app from Japanese chiptune band/development house YMCK that allowed the user to program rudimentary 8-bit sequences on their phone. This was the first application I saw that used orientation of the phone to affect the frequency of a low-pass filter, and this gesture was so natural and intuitive, it opened up some pathways for me. I also was inspired by the Teenage Engineering line of Pocket Operators. They’re not only so portable and fun to use, but part of what makes them successful is their limitations — in effect, it’s what they leave out rather than what they include that gives them personality. For breakerbox, I really wanted to find that middle ground between play and expressiveness — I wanted it to be powerful enough to be truly expressive and engaging for musicians, but also opinionated enough that it has its own “sound” or identity, and is fun to play with for beginners. Sound-wise, I’m really influenced by hip-hop producers like Q-Tip, DJ Shadow, Hank Shocklee, and J. Dilla, and electronic producers like Amon Tobin and Enduser, who deconstructed and recontextualized these loops into their own original music.
YMCK app by YMCK
Pocket Operator by Teenage Engineering
For my early sketches, I envisioned a small cube, with a speaker on one face, and controls on another face, and depending on the orientation, each of the 6 faces would trigger a different audio effect (low-pass filter, high-pass filter, glitch/beat repeat, etc).
But I realized that some of the more complex effects would be too ambitious to achieve in on-chip DSP in the time allotted for this project (especially the time-stretching/resampling required for real-time tempo changes), I decided to use Ableton running on a host computer for the sound design and DSP. This removed the need for a speaker internal to the breakerbox and changed the course of my design to be more of a controller than a standalone instrument. It also freed me up to think more creatively about the user experience and product design rather than signal processing.
For this project I wanted to include two venerable drum loops from the standard repertoire of breakbeats and hip-hop, but also immediately recognizable to the general public from from their use in pop music, advertising, film and TV. I wanted contrast but also compatibility; and I wanted loops that sounded good when filtered and mutated in various ways, and at very slow and very fast tempos. The obvious choices for me were the “Amen Break” (from the 1969 recording of “Amen, Brother” by the little-known soul group The Winstons — itself, a sped-up funk re-working of the standard gospel refrain “Amen”) and the “Funky Drummer” break (from James Brown’s largely improvised “Funky Drummer” single from 1970). Clyde Stubblefield was the drummer featured on “Funky Drummer”, and the drummer on “Amen” break was Gregory Coleman. Here’s the two loops after I processed them, cleaned them up a bit, and warped them both to a tempo of 128bpm:
Breakerbox v7 - Amen 128bpm.mp3
Breakerbox v7 - Funky 128bpm.mp3
Both breaks went on to be hugely influential in defining the sound of hip-hop, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, and more, and both proved to be highly versatile and resilient to modifications and mutations, twistings and tweakings. I worked on various kinds of filters and glitch effects, and settled on two very basic filters familiar to anyone who DJs (a high-pass filter and low-pass filter, with slight resonant bump on both) and a simple “beat repeat” glitch effect. All three effects are stock effects in Ableton. For the filters, I set the frequency to be the variable parameter, and for the beat repeat glitch effect, I set the size of the repeat window to be the variable parameter. I intended for the roll (left-right tilt) to affect the frequency of the low-pass filter when you roll to the left, the high-pass filter when you roll to the roll, and the pitch (front-back tilt) would affect the size of the beat-repeat window.