Eyecillators

Generation 1 (2014-2018)

The direct descendent of the Little Furry Oscillators albeit with less fur. Sorry about that. We ran out of fur – or rather, the fur was left behind in Costa Rica when we moved to Baltimore. Not to say that we won’t have more fur in the future, but the massive pile we had access to is currently in storage, awaiting retrieval on a supply run that has yet to happen. Somehow, not too long ago, I managed to do a lot of international travel on relatively little income. Throw a job and an apartment and responsibilities and whatnot in the way and we’re lucky if we can make it out to Rehoboth. Hoping to change that. But enough about me – here’s our new thing, as described via cutting and pasting the Little Furry Oscillator and updating where needed. Because it’s late and my creative juices are waning.

Eyecillators. Eye + Oscillator. Clever right? Once again designed for those seeking playa accessories, corporate holiday stocking stuffers, harajuku harsh noise and possibly even serious musicians. A guaranteed 2.5 minutes of sheer multi-sensory delight awaits you upon sampling said critter – after that, you’ll have to get creative, which, I guess is kind of the point. We used to make these covered with fur and it confused people. So we nixed the fur and added a control voltage output for modular-synth tweakery which seems to be all the rage these days.

Once again, it’s a 3-oscillator, cascaded NAND opto-synth with controls over pitch and voltage sag. Combine these two variables together in a modified Northeastern gamer grip and go to town – I’m sure they’d love to hear your bird-songs outside the Cold Stone on 2nd and C. Or the mall. Those are ironically hip again, right?

Gallery

Generation 2 (Workshop Box – 2016)

In the fall of 2016, we briefly expanded to a workshop box that featured basically two Eyecillators in one box, with the results looking somewhat like this:

Generation 3 (2019)

Reintroducing the Eyecillator, a small, yet surprisingly complex little light-sensitive noise maker from VF designed for lazy Sunday enthusiasts, STEM evangelists, musicians and other folks who just aren’t all that into college basketball. So what is it? Let’s go the portmanteau route – eye + oscillator = Eyecillator. Clever, right? Or at least it was when I first started making this kind of thing back in 2012-ish as an excuse to use up left over pieces of faux fur from an art installation. That later evolved into a small, budget-friendly table-top synthesizer for the creative musician crowd that I built for a good second until my daughter’s naps became too few and far between to keep up steady production. Once I finally realized that, I decided to take a break from building to figure out how to make this design easier to produce while also navigating school activities, play dates, sports, violin lessons, a full-time job and the occasional weekend jaunts to various regions to build instruments with new friends and play a show or two – not to give too much insight into my personal life or anything. That might’ve been a run-on sentence. The good news for those who made it through that diatribe and/or skipped ahead is that I do believe I’ve come across a design that will allow all the previously-mentioned activities to occur unfettered. Not to mention that as an added bonus, once my kid is old enough to join some scout troop, I can wheel these out as some sort of STEM-inspired badge-giving project of sorts and forever cement my reputation among the other parents as that weird dad – like I needed any help with that.

So here it is – a small, Tom Bugs/Eric Archer inspired 4-oscillator, cascaded NAND opto-synth with controls over pitch and voltage sag, as well as the modern addition of a third control over the frequency of a misappropriated telephone chip that acts as a somewhat strange filter of sorts. When used properly, it can chirp along with the best of them, as well as do its utmost to sound like that motorized garbage can robot from that one space movie…but with a drug problem. Not to mention that for this build, there are no wires. There is no case. Just a cool little light-controlled circuit, some components and the guarantee that you’ll be able to spark at least two and half minutes of unbridled joy out of this thing before you have to pack up and get serious about the week ahead.