Paperback Hack

My fiction is filled with conductive ink and its quantum prowess. While only in imagination am I able to summon the passion of dead writers such as William Shakespeare, the pop culture trends of the maker movement have at the very least introduced affordable conductive ink to the marketplace. I do like to believe, and quantum physics does allow it, that the essence of an author's motive is sustained in their actual writings. Most pencils and pens, inks especially, are prone to conductivity.

As an author, paper and ink are my main media. I have no qualms about investigating the carbon basis of my media, and I especially enjoy investigating the other side of written language, namely the oral tradition from which it descends. This side of my art leads me into sound, the bio-acoustics of our languages. Cool stuff indeed.

When I first saw the Bare Conductive Touchboard, I knew I was fated to own one. This is a simple Arduino based micro controller that incorporates mp3 player sensibility, so basically anything that can send an electrical impulse to it, from tomatoes to their own Bare Ink, can be used as a sound generator.

I decided to incorporate this into a novella I wrote, in which essentially the protagonist gets abducted by alien music. Yup. I also decided to insert a keyboard into the paperback. This blog entry is basically a how to for hacking a paperback.

1: Get a paperback, for example Joe4 by me.

2: Add conductive buttons or sensors or even a keyboard to it, like this:

3: Connect to a micro controller which houses mp3 audio data and hit the buttons like this:

I employed a Kickstarter campaign to fund my fledgling audio studios, and this enhanced paperback/conductive ink/audio book package was the maker package most backers selected. I somehow knew in advance it would be difficult making a nice conductive ink screen print on the paper that comes with these print-on-demand books. And I was correct, so I had indicated I would make a "bookmark" midi-synthesizer on wood veneer to go along with the package. After stumbling my way through learning screen printing and playing around with techniques to get nice quality conductive ink prints, I was able to make a clean screen print and the bookmark as pictured here:

In addition I recorded each chapter and produced my first audiobook. An initial reviewer laments my voice as a kind of bad impersonation of William Shatner. Since I've frequently gotten comparisons to Tom Waits, I say this is a good thing. Voices are unique bio imprints for most certain!

I had promised my backers that I would also include alien music with this keyboard, so I did go ahead and generate some tunes via Ableton, the audio program I use for all recording and for midi work. I don't expect these to be the greatest alien hits of the universe any time soon, but feel free to listen to them on my Soundcloud channel:

And if you're in the mood for some bad William Shatner, please feel free to listen to the evolving Black Hole Butterfly mega-novel on Soundcloud or even pay good hard-earned money to listen to my to-be-abducted-by-aliens-voice via Audible. Have a great night!