Sight and sound combine in this engaging synthesizer sculpt

We will always have a soft spot for circuit sculpting projects; anything that has components supported by pretty rows of brass wires always captures our imagination. But add a little light and a lot of sound to that, and you have something like this hybrid synthesizer sculpture that really catches the eye.

[Eirik Brandal] calls his creation "corwin point" and describes it as "a generative dual-voice analog synthesizer". It's built with a wide-open architecture that invites exploration and serves to draw eyes – and ears – into the room. The lowest level of the sculpt contains all the "boring" digital stuff - an ESP32, the LED drivers and the digital-to-analog converters. The upper level has the most visually interesting analog circuitry, built mostly in the "dead-bug" style on a frame of brass wires. The user interface, mostly a series of potentiometers and switches, lives at this level, as does a SeeedStudio WIO terminal, which is used to display a spectrum analyzer of generated sounds.

Going back a little, there's a seemingly incongruous vacuum tube overdrive with power amp and speaker in an acrylic enclosure. A thick acrylic vertical element dominates the whole and houses the synth delay line, and the light pipes which wind through the sculpture pulse in time with the events of the sequencer. The video below shows the synth in action - the music it generates never quite sounds the same twice and is unlike anything we've heard before, except perhaps briefly when we've heard something something like the background music to Logan's Run.

Hats off to [Eirik] for another great and great sounding release; you may remember his "cwymriad" caught our attention earlier this year.