The Shrieker developed from the steam machines, initial ideas involved some sort of crude reed device powered by bellows or a foot-pump to produce a continuous tone that could be simply produced. Whilst looking for such devices in a general hardware store I came across some dog chew toys. Back in the studio I began to experiment by attaching things to the aperture of the toy that produces the squeak in order to change the sound. Gluing a cheap party blower to this produce some surprising results. I think maybe the low tone of the party blower acts as a modulation source for the higher pitch squeak causing it to distort into a very organic sounding shriek. So effective are these devices that whilst testing them on campus students though there was a abandoned baby some where on the premises. Variations on this theme include adding a tube so the device can be blow into and adding more sounding reeds. Their close resemblance to something animal/human sounding maybe has something to do with its operation, in a sense mimicking vocal emanations. I might try connecting one to an air-compressor?