I started building Ambiguous devices in 2013. My first devices were experiments with lm386 op amps used both as low voltage amplifiers and as signal generators I called “Howlers.” I built several of these devices for friends, and in 2017 started conducting workshops. Howlers were appealing to me because they were simple to build as electronic devices, engaging to play using fingers as conductive points to interact with the circuit and aesthetically fun to put into different kinds of enclosure. I imagined howler orchestras of low volume feedback in restaurants replacing the band shows I could no longer participate in due to a diagnosis of Meniere’s disease after several years of inexplicable hearing loss.
I did not, however, know at the time that Tom Davis and Paul Stapleton in the UK had been engaged in a similar project called ambiguous devices at almost the same time. Davis describes ambiguous devices as an incomplete instrument comprised of networked data and a physical instrument that comes into being as it is played. My ambiguous devices are similarly partial, unfinished (or partially realized) and I contacted Tom in 2019 to ask permission to use the phrase in connection with my instruments and he graciously agreed. I think this is the spirit of DIY and DIT (to reference my friend John Richards whose instruments I have also learned to build).
Here is a link to Tom Davis: https://tdavis.co.uk/ambiguous-devices/ and to John Richards: https://dirtyelectronics.org/.
