muyang_lyu
My name is Muyang, a warm, chemically inert crystal U+1FAA8, that grows slowly under pressure and tastes salty.
I’m a amateur in maker culture and open-source hardware. My work usually traces the social and scientific history of electronic devices and explore ways of reusing and misusing old circuit.
My current work investigates several models of primitive analog artificial neurons and how they have been used by groups ranging from cybernetic scientists and avant-garde musicians to DIY robot enthusiasts. In installations and performances, I’m going to bring some self-built analog synthesizer and Beam bots based on those neurons.
The name BEAM stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics and refers to a series of small robots developed by Mark Tilden in the 1990s, inspired by Rodney Brooks’s behavior-based robotics. These small, bug-like creatures that are driven by a limited number of “neurons” and consume so little energy that they can often run on solar power. Despite their simplicity, they are able to move and respond to their surroundings in surprisingly complex and stable ways.
The synthesizer based on operational trans-conductance amplifiers(OTA), a component used in analog neurons in VLSI circuits and in the voltage-control sections of synthesizers. The idea was let the current mimic the physical behavior of a leaky integrate-and-fire neuron. I was greatly inspired by Wolfgang Spahn’s Confetti Neurons, which are based on op-amps. However, since I had not seen any OTA based neuron used in synthesizer, I decided to build one myself.
