I love DIY projects, though I hardly ever fin­ish any one I start; but cir­cuit bend­ing and out of the ordi­nary elec­tronic instru­ments fas­ci­nate me. We have posted in the past arti­cles about Leo Theremin, Clara Rock­more, 8 bit music and glitch, also a hack­ing man­ual with links to work­shops to cre­ate elec­tronic musi­cal devices.

This time a want to intro­duce you to a project by Travis Feld­man, an edu­ca­tor, inven­tor, and musi­cian. He cre­ates art­ful hand­made elec­tronic devices, and has been mak­ing elec­tronic musi­cal instru­ments and mod­i­fy­ing his own home stu­dio record­ing gear since 1999. He has taught courses on games, ani­ma­tion art, and lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton, Lewis & Clark Col­lege, and the Pem­broke Hill School.

Now he has decided to leave his lit­er­a­ture teach­ing life for some­thing much closer to his per­sonal pas­sion: cre­ate elec­tronic musi­cal instru­ments. He is the cre­ator of Mol­e­cule Synth.

The Mol­e­cule Synth is a unique, utterly new kind of musi­cal instru­ment. It offers the ele­men­tal com­po­nents of a tra­di­tional key­board syn­the­sizer — a speaker & amp, a sound gen­er­a­tor, and a pitch con­troller — but presents those ele­ments as pieces that you arrange (and rearrange!) in var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions to cre­ate your own musi­cal device. The Mol­e­cule Synth is designed to be intu­itive to use: each of its hexag­o­nal pieces is color-coded to indi­cate what that piece is and does, and each piece is marked to show how it con­nects to other pieces. With these build­ing blocks, you choose how to con­fig­ure your instru­ment, and, later, you can move the pieces and con­fig­ure an entirely new instrument!

Mol­e­cule Synth should become what he describes as the addi­tion of Lego + Synths and Phys­i­cal Elec­tronic… a “wild” synth expe­ri­ence that should enrich if not over­pass whichever sounds that come out of tra­di­tional keyboards.