A feedback string resonator that can take external inputs and create sounds ranging from subtle sympathetic resonances to complex feedback. I am recording an album of collaborations with this instrument with support from the Canada Council for the Arts for release in spring 2025.
The instrument consists of a transducer, strings, pickups, and custom circuitry I designed consisting of amplfiers, filters, distortion, and a PT2399 based delay that can swap between serial and parallel processing.
I designed a lab for students in Princeton’s Musical Instruments, Sound, Perception, and Creativity class. The lab teaches students fundamentals of synthesis and electronics through the creation of a simple analog monophonic synthesizer featuring a square wave oscillator, lowpass filter, amplifier, speaker, and a graphite keyboard. The lab has been completed by over 100 students. The lab is available here.
A series of light sensitive drone instruments created for the premiere of my piece Sound Field by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. Photoresistors alter the timbre and loudness of the sound according to the ambient light or player action. The players move around the performance space with these instruments while a network of delays running on laptops around the space pass sounds around. This piece evolved into Breathe/Chime, a phone based version of the delay network.
The instruments consist of a custom circuit board, 3D printed body, and lasercut faceplate.
In 2017 I participated in a residency at the Banff Centre. During this time I made field recordings from around the area and experimented with making instruments out of ice. These instruments involved freezing sheets and resonant chambers to strike and to attach strings to. The most successful of these instruments was an ‘ice cello’ which was made using a cello string and a hollow ice block. It sounds like grinding ice and whale song.
I shaped the sounds of this instrument and the field recordings from Banff into a track called Winter Music. This track is designed to be improvised with and has been performed by several people and groups in the years since. India Gailey released a version on their debut album Lucid available here. The ice cello is most prominent in the final section of the piece.
Sequencer for Norns + Grid + 16n created for live manipulation of pitch, rhythm, and loop.
The shape of a melody outlined on the 16n is scaled vertically using knobs on the Norns to set the upper and lower limits. The Grid indicated the current loop window and allows for rhythmic creation. The sound here is a simple internal synthesizer. Flyway also outputs CV and MIDI.
Four track live performance drum sequencer for Norns + Grid.
Each track plays a sample. There are controls for probability per track, overall length, and to store patterns. The most unique element is a control to invert each track so that each step that had been on is turned off and each step that had been turned off is turned on.
This instrument and piece were developed in collaboration with David Borts for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk). Performers around the room play simple chime sounds, which are recorded and played back by a web-based pitch-shifting delay written in RNBO and opened on the audience members’ phones. The pitch shifting follows just intonation ratios which become increasingly complex as the retuned sounds are recorded and again retuned by other guests’ phones. Having started as simple chiming, the soundscape gradually becomes complex and self-sustaining. The instrument can be opened here.
Dmitri Tymoczko asked me to create a live video improvisation instrument to accompany his piece Glimmer. The piece is improvised based on prompts that Dmitri sends out during the performance. The video follows these themes while subtly transforming through speed changes, blur, colour saturation, and math operations on the matrix. It is programmed in Max/MSP/Jitter and controlled using an XBox controller. This recording is from the premiere performance in Princeton, and has since been performed at the World Congress on Philosophy in Rome.