An instrument that becomes what it learns you are.
A handcrafted electronic instrument built from industrial materials — metal, acrylic, wire, components — fused with custom electronics: a sound microcontroller and capacitive touch surfaces. Fixed in space, somewhere between sculpture and instrument. It has a presence before anyone plays it.
A camera above the object. A machine vision model running below. The space around the instrument is part of the instrument — your approach, your hesitation, the gesture you make before your hand arrives. The system learns this. Over sessions and months it builds an increasingly specific model of one person’s gestural vocabulary. And then it begins to anticipate.
By the midpoint of a session, predictions shape sound before a gesture completes. The instrument responds to what it expects, not what happened. You can confirm that expectation or break it. Both feel like composition. Both raise the same question: who is authoring this?
Materials
Metal, acrylic, wire
Sound microcontroller
Capacitive touch surfaces
Internal light
Camera (machine vision)
Status
Ongoing — 2024–
Reykjavik / Brittany
Collective
Absolumont, Reykjavik
Haus community, Reykjavik
Research question
When a machine has watched you long enough to predict you, who is authoring the sound — and who owns the instrument?