LURU Hangs w/ The Indian Sonic Research Organisation (ISRO)

Both, noise and music, are forms of sound.

“So, the name is obviously a joke,” says Yashas Shetty, only half-smirking. Over two decades ago, “somewhere around 2006,” Yashas co-founded the Indian Sonic Research Organisation (ISRO) which cheekily resonates with the acronym of the country’s space agency, “primarily as a group that was playing music but also [holding] workshops.”

And over the years, “it’s grown into a collective that explores sound in all of its forms, not just as music,” he says, but also “kind of exploring ideas of what it means to work together as a collective,” he adds.

Sound investment

In the early evening of a weekday, the LURU newsletter team drops into the ISRO studio in RT Nagar, and there were otherworldly, ravey beats emanating from it. We walked into studio assistant Ashok Kumar and Marc Dusseiller aka dusjagr “a nomadic researcher and workshopologist” from Switzerland tinkering with a self-assembled ATtiny85 microcontroller through the interface on a laptop to create these underground clubbing sounds.

Marc tells us, he met Yashas, a long time ago “at a little do-it-yourself electronics jam session in Spain.” And a few months later, he flew to the city “to do workshops together on making do-it-yourself synthesisers.” And then, the duo takes us through the working of the ATtiny85 microcontroller, “It’s already the fifth generation version now,” Marc says. “And we’re programming it to produce sounds like the original 8-bit sounds of an old GameBoy or Nintendo.” He shows one of the interface device versions of this sound equipment that they “made in the shape of a cassette because they wanted it to look a bit like a music thing,” he says. “More like a joke,” he adds. And now, they’ve made a chip that can be programmed “to make techno music, I think,” says Marc. Yashas proposes that it might be “more acid house.” For the collective at ISRO, these do-it-yourself explorations with “minimal technology to produce something” is also one of its intentions.

“From such a small, low-tech chip, we get these sounds out. And now, with all of the new AI tools, I just wipe the code and make sounds,” Marc explains. “So, I was just talking to my laptop to make minimal techno or acid house, and then programming this without even having to know how-to. Now, this makes it [ATtiny85 microcontroller] a much more new, playful, accessible device,” he elaborates. “The chip in the microcontroller costs a dollar or 100 rupees,” Yashas adds. “So, most of the stuff that you see here,” Yashas says, pointing to the many electronic devices stacked all around the many levels of the studio space, “are all self-built.” At ISRO, “we just kind of build things on our own, not buy it,” Yashas matter-of-factly states.

Touch bass

They share this knowledge of building these devices that produce sound. “We learn how to make it, we mess around, and then pass it,” says Yashas. A lot of the “research and development work” at ISRO is “also tied to the open-source community.” And a lot of the open-source hardware and software “travels around the world” through their many associates and artists before making its way back to the studio. “That’s an important aspect of what we do here.”

Next, we’re playing with “the strange microphone” by Renee Dua – another member of this open collective. “It’s called a strange microphone because it’s strange,” states Yashas. And when we try to use it, it doesn’t immediately work, prompting Yashas to say, “it doesn’t do what it’s meant to be doing, and it’s temperamental.” Like most things brought up for display in life, “it refuses to work when we really need it. We have to work with that too.” Quickly moving on to the next one, Yashas uses a steel spatula, commonly seen in a kitchen flipping dosas; to strike a two-stringed instrument to create music from another self-built apparatus.

Another rectangular wooden panel with metal coins and electrical wiring contraption sitting on a table is a prototype. “It’s been turned into the Leaf Machine [a wooden box with metallic leaves branching out] that allows the player to switch between ten pre-programmed ragas,” Renee, who made this device, explains.

Have another sound on me

At ISRO, “sound is [the] material” that they work with, says Yashas, “of course because it is a physical thing.” He goes on to explain the movement of sound waves, hitting the eardrums, “and then it turns into an abstraction.” Sound allows for the inference of a lot of things, he points out. “Like if you go to a mechanic, one of the first things they do is listen to the engine. You go to a doctor, they listen to your heart. So, there’s a lot of information, which may or may not be practical, that you can infer from sound,” he says. And ISRO’s ongoing research sifts through our collective concepts of sound versus music versus noise, “we might have answers for it, but those are questions we ask.”

For the collective practice at ISRO, the sound-making instrument becomes the “best example” of a device to interface with a computer. “Or at least, the best that humans have built,” Yashas half-jokes. “And everything is built with super cheap materials,” he says, pointing to various self-built microcontrollers, synthesisers, speakers, and more electronic gadgets. “Most of these are half-baked ideas but half-baked ideas are good,” he insists.

Follow ISRO’s work here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly LURU Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.