Syringe Controller

Why am I using a syringe?

It's an experiment!

Before synthesizers and electronic music, if you wanted to make a sound, you had to make something vibrate. This required movement. Force. Physical effort: think a cellist bowing their instrument.

When electronics took over the role of the vibrating string, many instrument designers did away with the need for these larger physical movements, choosing small knobs or sliders as an interface to the sound.

While a knob is general (it can be used to control anything), a box full of knobs and sliders requires very small motions on stage, and lacks the theatricality of a slapped upright bass or a struck drum.

But beyond the spectacle, why would an audience member care about seeing the instrument performed? For one thing, so they know the instrument is being played at all. Think how often you've heard an offhand joke wondering if a laptop DJ or electronic musician was just on stage pushing play on Spotify and waving their hands around.

Well, so what? As a dancer, if there's no risk involved for the performer, no relationship to the music, why should I risk looking silly dancing? The DJ can't respond to me anyway. If this performance is just playback, identical every night, there's no connection, liveness, none of the spark of an infinitely unique shared experience. One where anything could go wrong, but also...

So why a syringe? It's something with more flavor than a knob. As an electronic music performer, I'm constantly in a call and response with the audience, making small surgical adjustments: slowly bringing tracks in and out, adding or removing a little tempo, volume, or bass from the sound. A syringe seemed like an appropriate metaphor, a tool we're all familiar with for making careful adjustments.

Compared to a knob, the syringe makes certain things I want to do to the music easier, some more kinetic, and some just more fun. Because it's a big plunger I have to move, it makes certain things harder.

But that's what gives an instrument, or a tool, character. It's good at what it's good at because it's bad at what it's bad at. And who knows - maybe the music made with such a specific instrument will have an interesting, unheard-before quality to it too. That's the experiment.

Video clips

Software

Above, a screenshot of the custom software that communicates with the Syringe controller and Ableton Live during performance. It's an arrangement of the most important information I need while playing, like which loops, samples, or tracks are loaded into each tube, as well as each tube's volume and FX. It also has a few important features Ableton doesn't offer, like viewing more than one waveform at the same time, and track searching and sorting by key, tempo, and genre.

Example Sets