Make the Music With Your Pump

Apparently diabetic art is catching on.

In November of last year, I posted about my video piece entitled "Diseased Sensations" making it to Post-VideoArt.com. During some bored browsing on Myspace.com, I found this musician, Vijith Assar. His featured song is entitled, "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Bleeding Fingertips". In his blog, he describes it as follows:

The complete title for this is "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Bleeding Fingertips." I wrote it for a computer music class I took in college. It's a concept piece dealing with diabetes, made entirely from sounds produced by my fingertip lancing device, blood glucose meter, and insulin pump (and believe me, I was shocked when I realized that the user feedback tones for my meter and my pump were in the same key). When I showed it to a diabetic friend of mine, he nearly had a panic attack because he thought his pump was going haywire.

It starts with the sound sequence associated with prepping a blood test and lasts exactly as long as it takes to run one on a Lifescan One Touch II, the brand of meter I used for most of my childhood, before ending on the device's distinctive confirmation chirp. In a manner of speaking, this was partially inspired by Glassjaw's "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Silence," the title track to an album which deals heavily with themes of chronic illness.

I got to give props to the fellow diabeto. The track is pretty slick.

Related links:

• Vijith Assar's MySpace
• My MySpace