Purple Earth Hypothesis
Welcome to my DIY synthesizer website. Here are some of my projects. Stay tuned for updates!
Modular Briefcase Synth
An analog modular synthesizer built into a briefcase. I made it during the second half of 2024. It has 10 or so modules which can be patched using banana jack test leads. There’s a MIDI to control voltage adapter (in a takeaway container!) which allows it to be controlled by a MIDI keyboard.
This is the first electronics project I’ve finished, though of course nothing is truly ever finished. All the circuitry is made on stripboard. The hardest part turned out to getting all the physical components to fit together.
The circuit diagrams for all the modules can be found in this git repo.
Here’s a video of this synth in action.
Combinatorial Audio Workstation (CAW)
CAW is a software-defined modular synthesizer which I’ve been developing since 2023. It’s implemented as a Rust library allowing modules to be defined and composed programatically. Patches can be static, where the synthesizer is a program that you compile and run, or patches can be dynamically built up in a jupyter notebook. Here’s an example of using jupyter to incrementally write a patch for CAW.
CAW works on Windows, macOS, Linux, and web browsers.
In addition to building instruments for live performance, CAW can be built into other projects to generate sounds or music. I’ve used it in a couple of game jams here and here.
There are a bunch of examples of CAW in action over on my youtube. Here are some that I’m particularly happy with: