Mind-blowing music machine created with Lego

26 Apr 2014
Play House
Play House
Alex Allmont


Programmer and artist Alex Allmont has used Lego Technic to create an incredibly complex analogue kinetic sculpture that plays minimal house music.

Play House is a desk-sized installation that produces sounds using complex interconnecting systems. Allmont made it for experimental music festival AudioGraft in Oxford in March.

The intricate mechanism combines a drum machine, sequencer and effects all made out of Lego and powered by a central motor. As the machine rotates and taps with cogs and pedals and levers, a signal is produced that is then interpreted by synths: one that mimics the classic TB303 synth's squelching base sound, while the drum generator has pads routed to a snare, bass and hi-hat sound. Listeners can put on headphones and stand in front of the desk, so they can hear the music while watching the associated components moving in unison.

Allmont told he was inspired by a downtempo acid house sound that "shifts attention between the rhythm and lead parts". "You don't so much have the big drop common in dance music where the energy is released on cue, it's more an internal exploration picking it apart whilst the rhythm holds together the space." "I wanted to capture the observation of detail in this piece but not force the audience into it," he explains. He wants listener to shift their attention between the sound itself and the mechanism that generates it. "Sometimes the music will lull and then the mechanisms stand out, but when those familiar synth sounds sweep around you are taken somewhere else," he adds.

Allmont got hooked on analogue kit after playing with an old VCS3 synth at university. "The sound is really warm with an ugliness ready to jump out at you," he says. In Play House he tries to recreate some of the old synth sounds using Eurorack modules.

Being able to see the inner workings of the piece is important to Allmont: "I use a lot of technology but I get frustrated when the workings of something is hidden, I like to see the whole process."

Play House
Alex Allmont

He planned out the elaborate piece in sketches and by making small mechanisms, incorporating a range of elements he'd used in previous works.

There wasn't time to incorporate a couple of the elements he'd wanted to include, such as a random number generator and a mechanical memory element. However, he did carry out the research and development of these elements -- which he's explained in detail in Make magazine.

The random number generator involved a ball that would bounce down through a set of pegs and land in one of four slots to make the machine push an actuator that would carry out one of four operations. This was going to be used to tweak the melody of the acid bass line and perhaps even drum patterns. The mechanical memory element involved recording sound onto little sections of cassette tape and running them backwards and forwards over tape heads to create a little sampler.

Choosing to drop these R&D elements from the final piece was difficult for Allmont. "The tipping point was realising how much time I had versus the risk of getting them working well enough to exhibit."

Once he'd made the call to cull these elements and got over the feelings of failure, he felt "completely refreshed". "A lot of the peripheral work around R&D was still useful and helped me realise that the super complex mechanisms would be detrimental anyway, the chunkier look of the final piece came from that," he explains.

Allmont says he'd like to explore the tape sampler in another piece but he's glad he left it out of this one. "I think it would have muddied the waters. Tape has a lot of historical weight so it might be best to focus on something that uses it more directly, or ignores it more completely -- either way it's more central."

What does he think of the resulting music? "I'm very happy with it, but personally I would have liked more movement around the sound space," he told us. "The matrix mixer at the front centre of the piece can route the sound all over the place but there wasn't enough room to get enough Lego actuators in to control it. I could have opened up the reverb and echo a little more and had a lot more character with the flanger affecting the hi-hats."

Despite this, he says the first time he plugged it in on site "it reeled out 10 minutes of glorious sound leaving me with a huge grin on my face".