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.