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?"
"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...
