So hands up anyone who as a small child built a cardboard robot costume, or a control panel for a space ship. Don’t be shy, there’s plenty of us. Who of you have recently created a more realistic space ship out of MIDI keyboards, cables and modular racks? With lots of blinking lights? Yes.
Now, on a different angle: who grew up anxiously twisting a pen, or spinning a light on a turntable, or scratching a favourite bit of metal? Back then it was ‘weird’ or ‘childish’, but we’ve come a long way and know that some children need that twisting and scraping to soothe their minds. To the extent that the Just Play company in the US has created multiple little plastic snap-together doodads that twist and scrape and rip little bits of velcro apart. They’re called Sensory FX and in Australia show up at K-Mart.
Yeah I have a few. Actually I wasn’t that interested until I discovered that the company also made a little sound studio to record the noises the modules create. It’s called the ASMR Megabar – and you can’t get it in Australia (probably anywhere now, as it looks to be deprecated).
Snap your bars on the side and scratch, scrape, tap and click to your heart’s content. The digital recorder holds about 30s of audio recorded with the microphone in multiple edits and replayed at multiple speeds. While it’s a lot of fun you can see some issues with the loose microphone and little bits getting lost, so there’s been an update – the Recorder Cube.
This one folds out from a protective cube to offer a range of clicking, scraping and button thumping gadgets built right in. A similar sound recorder picks up the noises, but the microphone is embedded in the recorder, and no pitch shift. The cube is quite elegant but doesn’t click with the individual bars. Meh. I got both.
It’s a wonderful thing that this ‘childishness’ is permitted these days. So that old people with synthesisers can start early.
Imagine the look of disdain on the faces of the Colin Benders of this world….Might be time to dust off my old box and felt pens and set the controls for the heart of the Sun.
I’m fully convinced that the collectors of synthesisers are still filling a need that has been with them since early childhood. It could be toy cars, or real cars, or vinyl records or whatever – but the soothing must be fulfilled and anyone with ‘disdain’ is in denial.