Chaos Synth
A panel of chaotic buttons and knobs that anyone can walk up to and make music with.
- Years
- 2026
- Type
- Hardware
- Role
- Electronics, firmware, software
A collaborative synthesizer installation for Borderland 2026, built with Gustav and Madde from camp Explorers. Walk up, start fiddling, and you’re making music: no musical knowledge needed, and no wrong notes. When nobody touches it, it plays an ambient drone.
An RP2350-Zero scans the buttons and pots and sends USB MIDI to a Raspberry Pi 4, which runs the synth engine in SuperCollider. All the musical meaning lives on the Pi, so remapping a control means editing a JSON file, never reflashing the firmware. A small web tool places the controls on a photo of the panel and generates that mapping.
The dream is a three-sided pyramid with a different instrument on each side. Version one, which went to Borderland, is a single side.