Hudební a zvukové nástroje

Creating instruments is an integral part to my musical creations. Here are some of my creations!

My live acts are constant in the tendency to constantly change. One specific aspect which allows and encourages the change is the multiplicity and variance of instruments. The benefit of this conglomeration of separate standalone sound sources is the modularity, which allows to change, replace, and adjust easily. It challenges me to constantly think of and create new instruments to add to this ever-changing dynamic entity, which identifies my live sets.

The Altar

Rather than a single instrument this is a conglomerate of a number of instruments, processing units and other things. In order to limit the setup and breakdown time at liveshows as well as making transportation easier, I have put a lot of existing and some freshly designed small instruments into this tailored box with many moving parts, as well as an old-timey speaker, lighting and many other things. Inside is a patchbay to connect and control all the separate instruments. It's a kind of a very complex music box - it makes great sounds, creates light and smoke, looks great and is easy to transport and setup.

Telephone Synth

This fully analog synthesizer is a result of my long fascination with old rotary dial telephones. During one of my countless strolls through a second-hand store, I stumbled upon one of those phones and bought it. At that time I had not thought further than using only the microphone for its distinguishable sound and visual-symbolic quality. And so I have been using the microphone in my live shows. But a few months later, while rehearsing John Cage’s Songbooks for a performance at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, a couple of the “songs” required a rotary dial to control some sound parameters. I knew I had one at home, so I naively offered my help to make it functional. That sent me on a multiple-year journey of researching, acquiring, and working with these dials (I have a feeling that the journey is still not over). One day I have gotten my hands on this beautiful Czechoslovakian Tesla telephone from 1949 (model “K” 39), and after consulting it with Nic Collins who has (thankfully) discouraged me from my initial idea to work with the actual “guts” of the phone, I have decided to build and put inside an analog synthesizer and use the rotary dial as an input controller. I proceeded with the use of shift registers, which count the number of impulses coming from the mechanical dial and further decide which out of the 10 oscillators will be sending the signal out. Each of these oscillators then has a separate potentiometer control for volume and a variable frequency. The frequency of most of the oscillators is controlled again via different LDR’s, some have potentiometers and others have a slot for an external resistor of any kind, which I use mostly for the physical body resistance upon touching a simple wire with my hand. During the building and tinkering, I have parted from the originally simple idea of 10 separate oscillators, and by “mistake”, I found an interesting way to connect them together which results in a semi-chaotic behavior, giving it a little bit of that “mind of its own”.
My main interest in using the rotary dial as a control was in order to allow for a
different, more performative and exciting way of playing a synthesizer, instead of simply turning potmeters and pushing buttons or keys. I used the body of the telephone for its undisputable symbolic and aesthetic quality. A telephone is something that one easily associates with communication, namely communication purely via sound and mostly the communication between two different people through this technology. But suddenly this nowadays obsolete communicating device is speaking for itself towards the audience via abstract electronic sounds and noises. I felt it was important that the sounds are purely analog, as it is originally an analog technology and any digital or otherwise processed sounds would create discrepancy, which could be perhaps interesting but not so much fitting my intentions with this instrument.
The latest addition to the synthesizer was in the form of a very old Tesla television remote control, that I found in my grandfather’s workshop. It consists simply of two high-value resistors on a very long cable which act as additional frequency modulators for multiple oscillators. The intention is to give this to the audience members during a performance, so they can play along with me. This further emphasizes the communication characteristic of the instrument, as the audience begins to directly communicate with the instrument, me, and the music. And at the same time it confuses the communication characteristic, since now the communication doesn’t happen through the means usually associated with the object — speaking. But it happens through the abstaract resistance values which are translated into equally as abstract sounds.

The Gun

A children’s toy gun which upon “shooting” produces flashing lights and simple sounds. It is circuit-bent in order to be able to change the frequency of both the sounds and the lights.
In the case of this instrument, its sonic abilities are fairly limited and it carries greater significance as a symbolic and performative element.
There is one great element that this toy allows; communication with the audience. Although sparsely, I do bring up verbal communication with the audience or other performers. However, the communication this instrument brings is of the different kinds, non- verbal. The concept of communication is present in multiple places in my instruments. In the case of the gun, the crowd becomes the center of attention as the “victims” of my “shooting” which creates a dynamic that would simply not be possible without them. The audience becomes more than a passive receiver; it becomes an integral ingredient of the whole act. I view it as communicating directly to them through action, emphasizing the fact that my whole musical effort is about communicating through means other than verbal, mostly the sonic.

The Golden Glove

I have designed and developed this instrument originally to communicate with the electromagnetic fields of the plasma lamp. Coils at the end of the fingers pick up the EM field when I touch the plasma ball. There are separate EM pickups on each finger, which are then sent to separate channels. For the circuit, which is hidden inside the old Tesla microphone case, I have used and slightly altered Jonáš Gruska’s open-source elektrosluch circuit. However, the glove can be used for many other applications for picking up EM signals. The slick golden aesthetic and the gestural performative character make for a great visual experinece during live shows.

The Plasma Lamp

It has been my childhood wish to have one of these, but I never had. To compensate for my unfulfilled dream, I have acquired one and developed it into a musical instrument. This is perhaps one of the few examples where my original intention actually turned into the final product without changing much along the way.
Inside the lamp, I put a gyroscope and an accelerometer connected to a microcontroller. The received data is processed in Max and used as values for either vocoding or granular synthesis of two other sources of choice. The lamp, similar to the lightbulb on my helmet, also has an option of microphone mode that turns it on or off based on the incoming signal. During a performance, I pick up the lamp and move with it, turn it around, touch it — changing the shapes of the plasma filaments, etc. And overall I just play around with this alien-like attractive object, thus interacting with the sensors inside and affecting the sound. This object is again a device of both sound and light quality. The electromagnetic field produced by the device is of a very rich constantly fluctuating nature in the frequency domain, and outputs a full-bodied sonic result when picked up by an electromagnetic pickup. To achieve greater fluctuation in the EM field, physical touch is required. For that purpose, I have developed the golden glove.

"The Cat" - A Light Controlled Synthesizer

As the very first analog synthesizer that I built (2019), it proved to be extremely influential, and to this day I still use it quite often. The initial goal was to build a theremin, emphasizing the body movement in performance. But when researching on how to do that, I came across light-dependent resistors, which have sparked my interest even more, due to the way the movement is linked to the sound, yet with another new added element - light. That made me embark on a journey that I am still on. The instrument consists of a single independent square wave oscillator with a HPF and two inter-dependent oscillators that ring modulate each other and are controlled by two separate LDR’s or alternatively a single potentiometer. While experimenting with it, I noticed a desirable square-like modulation, which happens when a flashing light source is directly touching the LDR’s. This results in periodic changes between very high and low frequencies, which under some settings can resemble an acid-like kick drum for a rhythmical element in my music. When experimenting with it, the only flashing light source I had at home were bike lights. Since then I kept using mostly the bike lights in my performances. Even though I could have easily created some controllable flashing light source, I was intrigued by the necessity for me to work with the limitation and the inherent characteristic of some object, and also again for its symbolic quality. The bike lights already mean something; they are easily associated with their original utilitarian purpose. I take this utilitarian function of an object and give it a new one; an artistic function. And this uprooted situation which creates an immediate relation to the object's original environment through a different context is something that I am after. It creates further unexplained tension while also making it strangely relatable. In my own interpretation, I see the symbolism in yet another form of communication. A light on a bike communicates to the surrounding that there is someone whose presence is important to recognize. It is also directly connected to movement, navigation, or guidance, both literally and metaphorically. I believe that it may also trigger a “beware” reflex, especially when blinking periodically, which can grab the attention of the audience. However, these are only my personal interpretations and I leave it open for the observer to interpret its significance. Such an approach is present in many of my instruments.
Ever since then, I have been working with light as a driving force in my music.

The Disco Helmet

Some of my instruments are controlled by light. The way I supply the light has changed over the years. Originally I did it via bike lights, which I later on put on my head to free up my hands. That was only one step away from creating this standalone battery-powered light-emitting helmet. It was created purely from materials found in second-hand stores. It consists of an old bicycle helmet, a couple of bike lights, and other light sources. I have glued on the helmet lots of small mirrors for additional light reflection and for the appealing glamorous aesthetic, reminding a disco ball. One of the light sources is a flashing RGB bulb, which has an implanted microphone inside so that the temporal frequency of the flashing is decided by loud incoming impulses. During my show, it is often the case that the amount of sounds results in very irregular behavior. Since the sound instrument are controlled by light and one of the lights is controlled by sound, I create a feedback loop of reciprocal modulation. Lastly, the obvious purpose for having it in the form of a helmet is to allow unrestricted hand movement while also resulting in the desired unintentional variations due to my head movement required by other causes.

The Football

I have a personal sentimental connection to this object. It used to be my mother’s childhood toy, which later on became a favorite toy of mine when I was a child and then disappeared from my life for many years until I found it in my grandmother’s attic. I immediately fell in love with the variety of sounds it produces as well as the object itself; a beautiful artifact. Due to small differences in the springs’ characteristics, the strength, length, rust, and how worn out it is, each one oscillates in different frequencies and has unique timbral and temporal quality. It is a toy and so just by the choice of the instrument, I already managed to bridge the gap between child’s play and musical play. But it fulfills this function in another layer, as it is not an electronic or automated instrument, so one has to keep playing it constantly, in order to produce any sound. It asks for attention and activation. At first, I simply attached a contact microphone to it and pluck the players. In some instances, I have used some analog processing and used it as a percussive instrument, a kind of drum machine. Then for a couple of years, I left it out of my live setup, while I was constantly provoked to do something with it, yet I didn’t know what. Only recently, I began to work on a collaborative project with Yannis Michos to give this object a musical life. We have made it into a standalone sound installation by building a mechanical robot with the use of stepper motors, microcontroller, and other mechanics. We called the installation simply Football Player. See sound installations in the menu for more info.