Gecho Mini Music Box Loopsynth on Kickstarter

Published on Dec 8, 2016 Gecho Loopsynth

"In music box you’ve seen gears, steel comb and cylinder with pins. Gecho doesn’t try to hide its printed circuit board and some electronic elements. You can touch them – actually, you are encouraged to touch them, nothing will break!

While you can’t see electrons moving in copper traces, there are twenty-nine colourful lights to show what is going on inside... and because interaction is embedded deeply in spirit of today’s technology, even our music box must not stay inert. It can hear your voice, pick frequencies off your musical instruments, remember and play them back to you. It has four sensors to measure distance of your fingers hundred times per second.

It senses magnetic fields and infra-red light, expanding your senses... and knows how to translate these invisible forces to something you can hear.

But most importantly, even with the very basic program, Gecho creates unique ambience for your ears.

Eager to explore it?"

via the Kickstarter campaign

"Gecho is a polyphonic, pocket synthesizer with interactive controls

How it works: TL; DR

Instead of knobs, it has touch-less sensors that react to your fingers. It also has very sensitive microphones that hear your singing, whistling or tapping. The collected signal is fed through a group of variable-resonant filters, forming chord-progressions. At the same time, environmental noise peaks disturb the filters settings, creating complexity of sounds.

Full story

I tried to make a music box using the current technology, replacing steel comb, pinned cylinder, cogwheels and springs with crystal oscillators and power cells... but I ended up with something more complex. It can be a music box - with a click of the button, it starts playing melodies straight away. But it can also be so much more...

Gecho doesn’t try to hide its printed circuit board and some electronic elements. You can touch them – actually, you are encouraged to touch them, nothing will break!

While you can’t see the currents flowing through copper traces, there are twenty-nine colourful lights to show what is going on inside... and because interaction is embedded deeply in spirit of today’s technology, even our music box must not stay inert. It can hear your voice, pick frequencies off your musical instruments, remember and play them back to you. It has four sensors to measure distance of your fingers hundred times per second.

It senses magnetic fields and infra-red light, expanding your senses... and knows how to translate these invisible forces to something you can hear.

But most importantly, even with the very basic program, Gecho creates unique ambience for your ears.

Eager to explore it?

What people said

"I've personally tested an early iteration and it was pretty amazing. I'm not good with the technical stuff, but in layman terms it is a box that turns any noise into music. So if you bang on the table, whistle, touch a fork on the wall, turn on a forklift, operate a piledriver, it all becomes music together, somehow. I tried my best at the beginning to make sounds out of tempo and as unharmonic as possible and it all became this sort of strange out-of-this-world melody. The funny thing is that the more I did it, the more I was entangled by it, like an ouroboros of sound, the brain eating itself in its meaning. I don't know how to explain it better..."

-- Nicholas Amorim, hobbyist composer, singer, drummer & guitars maker apprentice

"When I first saw the Gecho I was intrigued. When I touched it I was immediately mesmerised. My world just took on another dimension that I was in complete control of - it is amazingly cool."

-- Mike Dee, mobile games designer & enterpreneur

"Gecho is deeply meditative and amusing at the same time. The experience enables you to explore your hidden feelings, which you have never been able to put in words. It's like classical instrumental music with you being in the place of a composer. It is difficult to put your finger on it, but as soon as you put your hands on it you'll realise it's unputdownable. So I guess the best way how to explain what's the thing like is to say - it's addictive. First time I took it to work, it was grabbed from me immediately and only returned towards the end of the day with great reluctance."

-- Pietro, music enthusiast, amateur guitarist and poet, proud owner of Gecho sr.n.0010

How it works

Here are few videos that explain theory, anatomy and demonstrate Gecho in action" [playlist above]