Gyrophon

DIY electronic instrument

Electronic instrument which uses the smartphone’s acceleration sensor and touch screen to control pitch and intensity.

The Gyrophon app running on a Samsung phone, showing the touch grid
The app displays the sensordata as a small dot on a piano matrix.

The Gyrophon is an electronic instrument I invented during my time in college. The idea came out of my internship at Siemens where we used the sensor data from android phones. Then I had the idea to use this sensor data to control synthesizers.

I built the first prototype in pure python and the data was sent via bluetooth. In 2020 I rewrote the Gyrophon to use OSC over Wi-Fi and used a csound-expression backend.

I’ve experimented a lot with it during my improvisation classes at Akademie für Tonkunst Darmstadt. The main idea is to use touch x-y positions for velocity and timbre and use the accelerometer data for pitch. Thus you can play melodies by tilting the phone.

The Gyrophon desktop mixer with three voices and an effects rack
The desktop synthesiser with three connected devices (cygnius, aquila, lyra) and a shared effects rack.

Listen to an excerpt from my gyrophon sonata.

The code is available on github. You need to install the gyrophon app and run the server on your desktop.