We’ll always have a soft spot for circuit sculpture projects; anything with components supported on nice tidy rows of brass wires always captures our imagination. But add to that a little bit of light and a lot of sound, and you get something like this hybrid synthesizer sculpture that really commands attention.
[Eirik Brandal] calls his creation “corwin point,” and describes it as “a generative dual voice analog synthesizer.” It’s built with a wide-open architecture that invites exploration and serves to pull the eyes — and ears — into the piece. The lowest level of the sculpture has all the “boring” digital stuff — an ESP32, the LED drivers, and the digital-to-analog converters. The next level up has the more visually interesting analog circuits, built mainly “dead-bug” style on a framework of brass wires. The user interface, mainly a series of pots and switches, lives on this level, as does a SeeedStudio WIO terminal, which is used to display a spectrum analyzer of the sounds generated.
Moving up a bit, there’s a seemingly incongruous vacuum tube overdrive along with a power amp and speaker in an acrylic enclosure. A vertical element of thick acrylic towers over all and houses the synth’s delay line, and the light pipes that snake through the sculpture pulse in time with sequencer events. The video below shows the synth in action — the music that it generates never really sounds the same twice, and sounds like nothing we’ve heard before, except perhaps briefly when we heard something like the background music from Logan’s Run.
Hats off to [Eirik] for another great-looking and great-sounding build; you may remember that his “cwymriad” caught our attention earlier this year.
This seems like it’s best use might be to record this machine constantly, then listen to the output and when you hear something awesome, you store it and deconstruct it so you can insert it into your own music. No doubt you would struggle to get the “random” algorithm to reproduce any particular sequence.
A lot of generative synth stuff is meant to be taken on its own merits, as an experience or real-time improvisational tool, rather than as a sound design tool for planned music later. There’s certainly nothing wrong with recording, looping, or sampling a generated soundscape to create more conventional melodies, harmonies, or percussion from it, but if you’re going into generative tools expecting to reproduce particular sequences, you may be looking in the wrong place.