Two instruments that started life in my own work are now available in small numbers.
The Sonic Chessboard
In 1968 John Cage and Marcel Duchamp played a game of chess on a board built by Lowell Cross, in which every move changed what the audience heard. The piece was called Reunion. For my installation Indeterminate Structures, first shown at Sonoscopia in Porto in December 2023, I built my own version of that board.
Under its 64 squares sit light-dependent resistors that route 16 audio signals to 8 outputs. Place a piece, lift it, or let your hand hover, and the sound moves through the room. It is a game, a score and a mixing desk at once, and it needs no power at all.
The Sonic Chessboard is a limited DIY kit: a CNC-milled board of untreated cork, an annotated PCB, all components and hardware, the files to cut your own board, and build instructions. Chess pieces are up to you.
The Electromagnetic Pentagonal Antennas
The antennas are larger, more sensitive siblings of the Electromagnetic Sound Probe: a pentagonal wooden frame wound with hundreds of turns of thin enamelled copper wire, held by a handle of recycled cork. Close to a device they reveal its electrical voice; further away they reach for thunderstorms, solar storms and VLF radio. They come in two versions, with an XLR or a mini-jack output.
Update: the Pentagonal Antennas are discontinued in 2026. Their story and specifications remain on the Pentagonal Antennas page.