This project culminates in a ritual performance grounded in participation, presence, and sonic co-creation. Building instruments was not predetermined—many participatory or ritual practices rely on existing instruments, objects, or body-based sound.
But I became increasingly drawn to why artists choose to build their own instruments even when alternatives exist. Often this decision speaks less to necessity than to ethos: DIY culture, authorship, accessibility, and resistance to dominant technological paradigms.
For my own project, making became not just practical but symbolic and methodological. It allowed me to align material choices with the values of the ritual itself—openness, agency, and a rejection of black-boxed systems.
Learning from Makers: Why Some Artists Build Their Own Instruments
Looking at earlier figures, David Behrman recalls how the sudden availability of electronic components in the 1960s let musicians reclaim authorship of their tools. Nic Collins later described his “folk electronic instruments” as messy, tactile, and improvisational—an insistence on touching sound directly. At STEIM, Michel Waisvisz and the Crackle Box exemplified a culture where building, listening, and playing collapsed into one act.
More recent practices, from Jenny Gräf Sheppard’s ceramic speakers to Mika Satomi’s sounding textiles, show how instrument-building extends into material research and bodily engagement. Across these examples, the point is clear: building is not only technical, but a way to listen, to reclaim agency, and to keep technology at a human scale.
Why This Ritual Needed New Instruments
For this project, instruments were never intended as autonomous sound devices or vehicles for timbral novelty. They were conceived as ritual-specific tools, designed to unsettle fixed roles and flatten distinctions between “musician” and “non-musician.”
– Flattening Musical Authority through Novelty
Conversations with non-musicians revealed how deeply performance anxiety is embedded: many felt instruments were not “for them.” Commercial electronic gear often reinforces this, operating as opaque systems built for trained users. Socially, traditional instruments carry symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1993), marking who “belongs.” By inventing new instruments, I sought to remove that lineage. If no one has played them before, everyone begins equally.
– Instrument as Ritual Object
In many traditions, objects are crafted for ritual alone, serving as anchors of time, space, and intention (Bell 1997). These instruments similarly signal the performance as distinct from everyday time, helping to constitute the circle as a shared field of attention.
– Following the Capoeira Model
In capoeira, instruments like the berimbau are ritual anchors as much as sonic ones, often made by mestres themselves (Galm 2010). By building my own, I take responsibility not only for sound but for the conditions of the ritual—how it begins, how it feels, and how it invites others in.
DIY Culture and the Critique of Consumption
The instruments also situate themselves within DIY culture. Historically, DIY promised openness and resistance to corporate control, but it has also produced exclusions: technical skill and access to tools often become new gates. Some DIY makers have even evolved into boutique brands, reproducing the very dynamics they opposed.
I approach DIY here as a contested space—at once liberatory and limiting. My aim is to reclaim it as non-transactional creativity, where value lies not in polish but in presence and participation.
This brings me back to vadiar from capoeira: a drifting, purposeless play that resists efficiency and exchange. Creation here does not need to be productive or commodifiable. In this light, my instruments are not prototypes for markets or performance polish. They are tools for exploring possibility—where making itself becomes a practice of vadiar, lingering between materials, gestures, and intentions without pressure to arrive.
After deciding to build instruments for this project, my first choice was to work with everyday objects. I avoided pristine or exotic components; instead, I sought materials already embedded in daily life—domestic, industrial, or reused. This began intuitively, but soon revealed layers of meaning.
In capoeira, many instruments are historically crafted from what is at hand: coconut shells, wires pulled from tires, reused coins. This echoes a wider Afro-diasporic logic, where sonic invention grows from proximity and improvisation rather than specialized tools (Averill 1997; Monson 2007). The use of local and reused materials is pragmatic, but also entwined with histories of resilience and creative resistance. Continuing this lineage, I wanted my instruments to emerge from the same conditions as the ritual itself.
Another dimension appeared during rehearsals: the psychological distance between people and conventional instruments. Many participants hesitated to touch “official” tools, feeling unqualified. Yet when presented with springs, cups, or metal rings—objects familiar from other contexts—the fear eased. These objects carried no authority; they invited curiosity. As Lee Higgins (2012) notes, conventional instruments are often perceived as evaluative, creating exclusion. “Open materials,” by contrast, soften the musical space, shifting focus from correctness to exploration.
Everyday materials thus reshape not only the technical threshold but also the emotional and social conditions of music-making. They awaken agency by reframing music as presence rather than performance.
Initially, I turned to Berlin’s flea markets, expecting to find history-laden items. Instead, I found ornate vintage aesthetics that clashed with the egalitarian atmosphere I envisioned. I turned instead to IKEA: standardized, modular, and globally recognizable. Their neutrality supported prototyping, while their symbolic charge—emblems of mass production and sameness—made them fertile ground for détournement (Debord 1967). By hacking these objects into instruments, I disrupted their original narratives, activating them as collective tools of presence and resistance.
This transformative logic finds a striking parallel in Frank Ocean’s Endless. Here, scenes of construction—sawing, measuring, assembling—are ritualized, shifting from utility to choreography. Similarly, my instruments re-signify the ordinary: everyday objects lifted from routine, reframed as carriers of sonic and symbolic charge.
From the beginning, I approached instrument-making with a clear intention: to resist the “black box” aesthetic so common in electronic music. I wanted instruments whose workings were not mystified, but exposed—open, legible, and modifiable. This aligns with the broader stance I sketched earlier: tools should support rather than dominate, and invite participation rather than demand submission. A ritual space, after all, cannot grow out of opaque systems.
Electroacoustic practice offered fertile ground for this ethos. As Nic Collins and David Tudor demonstrated, electronic instrument-making can be accessible and driven by curiosity rather than mastery (Collins 2006; Behrman 2006). Their examples affirmed that fluency in engineering is not a prerequisite for meaningful sonic creation.
Yet over time I recognized the limits of transparency as a purely technical matter. My goal was not to train participants as builders, but to design instruments that could be intuitively understood—that anyone curious might figure out how they worked or even replicate them. But even when circuits were visible, many still found the world of soldering and hardware intimidating. This revealed that the barrier is not only concealment, but also unfamiliarity.
Transparency, then, is not guaranteed by open design alone. It must also be enacted—distributed across interaction, sharing, and community. In this project, I began to identify three complementary layers:
– Sonic–Gestural Legibility (in design): Instruments were shaped so that sound responds clearly to bodily action. Cause and effect between touch, movement, and sound is discoverable without verbal instruction. The goal is not precision control, but perceptibility—enabling intuitive relationships with the instrument.
– Participatory Sharing (in performance): In test performances, participants freely explored instruments, then exchanged discoveries with one another. This informal pedagogy became a form of collective demystification, dissolving barriers of expertise while shaping the group’s sonic ecology.
– Co-making as Future Possibility (in community): While not yet realized, I imagine workshops where participants build their own versions of these instruments—ranging from demonstrations to guided builds. Extending transparency into making itself turns design into invitation.
What began as a straightforward refusal of black-boxed tools thus evolved into a more nuanced understanding. Transparency is not simply a matter of visible wires. It is a practice: enacted through design, performance, and community, carried by gestures as much as by circuits.
A research diary gathers a personal reflection that extends the discussion of technical transparency in the main text can be found in the Appendix. Written originally as a research diary entry, it traces how my thinking about technology and agency shifted through practice: from an early binary of “support vs. control” toward a more nuanced view of technologies as existing along a spectrum.
Rather than offering a formal argument, the text records how these ideas unfolded in the studio. It reflects on how instruments can redistribute and reclaim control, and how agency is not only a matter of design but also of user skill, knowledge, and willingness. In this way, the appendix documents the evolving stance that shaped my approach to instrument-making: treating technologies not as sealed systems, but as spaces of negotiation and mutual shaping.
My instrument-making began not with blueprints or target sounds, but with hands-on engagement—touching, soldering, and breaking circuits. Early explorations with tools such as the crackle box, contact microphones, paper speakers, and feedback systems introduced me to a way of thinking about sound as emergent from gesture and material rather than abstract design. These experiments, many of them low-cost and DIY-friendly, shaped the foundation of my approach: instruments should be tactile, unpredictable, and responsive to the body.
A fuller account of these trials, including their technical details and documentation, is included in the Appendix. Here I want to highlight that while not every prototype carried forward into the final instruments, each encounter helped refine the ethos of this project: sound-making as embodied exploration, where technology is a collaborator rather than a closed system.
The relationship between body and instrument played a central role in my design process. This attention was informed in part by my experiences with capoeira, where instruments are shaped as much by the player’s body as by technique. The berimbau is a clear example: while commonly described as shifting by about a semitone between open and closed tones (Galm 2010), in practice this varies. For players with larger or smaller hands, the distance, pressure, and resting point of the coin or stone on the string alter the actual pitch difference. The instrument does not enforce a standard, but allows each body to leave a sonic trace of its own.
This stands in contrast to much electronic music-making, where precision and uniformity dominate. Even with newer technologies like MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression), bodily nuance is amplified only within pre-defined expressive parameters. I wanted my instruments to go further—to embed physiological difference itself. Elements such as skin conductivity, pressure, or habitual posture become variables that shape sound, producing diversity not from skill, but from being.
Rather than designing for an abstract “neutral” body, I aimed for instruments that respond differently to each person. This subtle shift reframes authorship: sonic outcomes emerge from embodiment rather than virtuosity. Conventional paradigms often treat physical variation as something to discipline through training or as limitations to overcome—big hands suit piano, strong lungs suit trumpet. Those who fall outside are either forced to adapt or excluded altogether.
By contrast, I see the body as a compositional element in its own right. Physiological differences—visible or imperceptible—can themselves become sonic material. What does it mean for pitch or timbre to be traceable to a specific body, not through mastery but through physical presence?
This resonates with Tim Ingold’s reminder, drawing from Sheets-Johnstone and Farnell, that the body is a “tumult of unfolding activity,” inseparable from perception and movement (Ingold 2013, 8). Designing from this view means attending not to ideals, but to variation—welcoming difference as a generative force.
Instruments, then, become more than tools: they become extensions of bodily being, amplifying sonic identities that emerge not from conformity but from plurality. In this way, instrument design becomes both technical and ethical: a practice of affirming difference through sound.
The instruments that eventually took shape did not emerge fully formed. My early attempts ranged from handheld circuits modeled after the pandeiro to string-and-resonator experiments inspired by the berimbau. Many of these prototypes failed—whether through impractical tensions, faint projection, or unexpected electronic behaviors.
Yet each misstep clarified the values that would guide the final instruments: sonic responsiveness to the body, openness to difference, and material legibility. Failed circuits and fragile constructions pointed me toward lightweight membranes, clear gesture–sound relations, and accessible building methods.
What mattered was not the success of any single prototype, but the process of trying, breaking, and adjusting. These failures shaped both my technical understanding and my conceptual orientation, paving the way for the instruments introduced in the next section. A fuller account of these experiments, including documentation and analysis, is provided in the Appendix.
Conceptual Foundations
The instrument Lua is based on the circuit logic of the crackle box, a sound-generating device whose output depends on the conductivity of the human body. By directly connecting the skin to an unstable audio circuit, each user produces distinct, irreproducible sounds—shaped by their own skin resistance, moisture levels, touch pressure, and gesture patterns. This creates a deeply embodied musical experience, one in which the instrument does not offer a stable sound palette, but instead mirrors the variability of the performer’s own body.
Visually, Lua resembles a clock. This form was not only aesthetically driven, but conceptually deliberate. In the context of ritual, the clock—normally a symbol of linear, productive time—is repurposed. It becomes a marker of suspended time: a moment set apart from the forward thrust of daily life. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2020) suggests, ritual offers a “dwelling in time” that interrupts the accelerated temporality of capitalist modernity. Lua does not tell time—it gathers it. It invites presence, slowness, and attention, all of which are fundamental to the ritual state.
The naming of the instrument follows this logic. In Portuguese, lua means “moon,” evoking cycles, rhythm, and night. It connects subtly to the Afro-Brazilian roots of capoeira, while also speaking to the temporal symbolism embedded in the instrument’s shape. In choosing this name, I sought to situate the instrument not only in a functional lineage, but in a poetic one—where its identity is defined as much by material behavior as by metaphor.
Circuit Variations and Signal Routing
Lua’s circuit design draws inspiration from the original crackle box developed at STEIM in the 1970s by Michel Waisvisz and Geert Hamelberg. That version, built around an LM709 op-amp, allowed performers to generate unstable and expressive sounds directly through their skin contact. It was one of the earliest examples of turning the human body into a live component in an audio circuit (Collins 2006; Waisvisz 1985).
During a hands-on workshop with Nic Collins—a central figure in hardware hacking and the author of Handmade Electronic Music—I encountered a revised version of the crackle box. His circuit substituted the original LM709 with an LM386 audio amplifier, making the design more accessible for DIY experimentation. This shift in component choice also brought about new sonic behaviors (Collins 2006).
As I began adapting Collins’ design to the needs of my project, I wanted Lua to move beyond simple skin-contact sound. I introduced a contact microphone into the system, allowing the instrument to respond to physical vibration as well as electrical touch. I also replaced the speaker with a transducer, affixed to the same surface as the contact mic. This created a material feedback loop: the transducer energized the surface, the contact mic captured those vibrations, and the signals merged into a layered sonic texture.
This hybrid system pushed me to study the LM386 chip more closely. Unlike typical op-amps, the LM386 allows for input from either pin 2 (inverting) or pin 3 (non-inverting)—or both. Curious about how this might affect Lua’s responsiveness, I built multiple circuit variations:
• Both inputs to Pin 2 (inverting): Highly unstable, producing glitchy and volatile results.
• Both inputs to Pin 3 (non-inverting): More controlled and stable, better suited to sustained textures.
• Split input—contact mic to Pin 2, skin to Pin 3: Created a field of interference and unpredictable modulation.
These small modifications gave rise to 3–4 distinct behavioral categories. Much like the gunga, medio, and viola berimbaus in capoeira—each playing a specific rhythmic and tonal role—these circuit types began to form an internal system of differentiated sonic functions. In a group setting, they invite responsive listening and role awareness, echoing the collaborative logic of ritual performance.
Ultimately, the variations were not just technical but symbolic. They allowed Lua to shift between states: from noise to tone, from control to surprise, from electronic volatility to acoustic intimacy. This adaptability was central to the ritual function of the instrument—not only to generate sound, but to generate presence.
Conceptual Foundations
The second instrument, Mar, takes its name from the Portuguese word for “sea.” As the counterpart to Lua (“moon”), it continues a symbolic lineage—moon and sea, tide and cycle, form and flow. This naming is not only poetic, but conceptual: where Lua emphasizes temporality and instability, Mar focuses on containment, resonance, and bodily memory. The cup form echoes the sea’s function as both container and source, while also resembling a vessel for ingestion—a gesture of embodiment and ritual participation.
This interpretation draws on a phrase attributed to Mestre Pastinha, one of the most influential figures in capoeira Angola: “Capoeira is what you eat.” The statement reflects an understanding of practice as deeply embodied—not merely performed, but consumed, metabolized, and absorbed into muscle memory (Almeida 2007).
In this sense, Mar serves not only as an instrument, but as a metaphor for ritual internalization. It invites a state of porous attention, where the body becomes both the site and the medium of sonic emergence.
Where Lua translates the body’s bioelectrical resistance into sonic instability, Mar returns to the physical—the acoustic, the resonant, the percussive. Its logic is simpler, more analog, but no less expressive. Here, sound arises not through circuitry, but through the pressure of touch, the vibration of membranes, the tension of springs. It is a sonic system attuned to motion, force, and form.
Design and Use
Mar is built from a plastic cup—an everyday, utilitarian container repurposed into a resonant chamber. A hole is cut at the bottom of the cup, through which a metal spring is fixed. The other end of the spring is attached to a Velcro strap, designed to wrap around the user’s upper arm just above the elbow. When tension is applied by extending the arm, the spring tightens and becomes playable.
The cup’s opening is covered with a balloon membrane, forming a lightweight drumhead. Inside the cup, a contact microphone is fixed directly beneath the membrane, capturing vibrations from the spring, the surface, and the performer’s gestures. This signal is then routed to a small speaker unit attached to the body, creating an open, wearable amplification system.
The instrument supports multiple modes of sonic interaction:
• Striking the membrane like a hand drum produces sharp, percussive sounds.
• Pulling the spring creates deep, thudding impacts as it bounces against the cup’s interior.
• Plucking or flicking the spring generates twanging, metallic tones akin to string instruments.
• Blowing air across the balloon sometimes produces flute-like tones, depending on pressure and angle.
Each of these sound behaviors is shaped by the performer’s individual body: the length of the arm, the strength of the muscles, the subtlety of movement. The body becomes not only the player, but the tuner—every gesture refracted through a personal physiology. This is a physical articulation of the idea that “how you move is how you sound.”
Technically, Mar is modest, minimal, and anti-spectacular. It uses a small, externally-mounted speaker and requires no digital interface or specialized processing. Its logic remains grounded in direct material interaction: gesture produces vibration; vibration is picked up, amplified, and immediately audible. This simplicity reflects the project’s broader ethos—an anti-black-box attitude toward sound technology, a desire to foreground material responsiveness, and a refusal of commercial polish. In collective performance, Mar often functions as a destabilizer—bringing disruption, friction, and bursts of surprise into the ritual space.
Although I began this project with clear ideas about function and accessibility, the act of making fundamentally reshaped my understanding of design. Materials responded—resisting, adapting, and suggesting. A wire too stiff, a spring too tense, a cup too small: every decision became a negotiation between body, tool, and matter. Authorship emerged not as imposition, but as a relational process.
Tim Ingold (2019) describes the artist’s role as following “the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being.” The instrument is not the realization of a fixed idea, but the trace of this ongoing dialogue. In this sense, I became less a creator than a conduit: the instruments were shaped through materials, echoes of capoeira, feedback from others, and trial and error.
Authorship here is distributed. IKEA-standardized plastic, copper wire, rubber membranes, my soldering iron, even the weather and my own patience—all left their imprint. Ingold’s concept of the “thing” as material becoming felt truer than any fixed notion of objecthood.
This ethos resonates with DIY practice, where necessity, improvisation, and the aesthetics of process take precedence over polished products (Dale and de la Fuente 2020). What emerged was not simply a device, but a relational artifact—formed through co-presence with people, tools, and conditions. Making became an act of listening: to material limits, bodily capacities, and the possibilities latent in failure.
In this light, building the instruments myself was not just practical but epistemological. Staying close to the process allowed me to remain responsive and avoid the compromises of outsourced fabrication, where “impossible” often means “not worth the cost.” By paying with time, care, and failure rather than money, I could insist on conditions that aligned with the ritual’s values—distributed agency, presence, and attentiveness.
For the final performance, I produced a full set of eight instruments—four of each type—based on the prototypes developed during the prototyping phase. However, I intentionally avoided replicating the previous instruments with exact uniformity. Each instrument included subtle differences in color, size, form, and internal circuitry.
While all eight instruments clearly belonged to the same two categories, none were truly identical. Even instruments that appeared interchangeable had underlying variations that affected how they functioned. Some differences were visual and tactile, while others were behavioral—arising from alternate circuit arrangements. For example, two Lua instruments both included toggle switches, but in one, the switch activated a feedback mode, while in the other, it changed the pitch between two discrete levels. This design choice created the illusion of sameness while embedding radical difference beneath the surface.
I viewed this approach as a kind of humor—a deliberate play on the aesthetics of mass-produced consumer goods. The design referenced the standardized industrial logic of companies like IKEA, but the outcome was unmistakably handmade, unpredictable, and inconsistent. This was not just a joke; it functioned as a material critique of industrial uniformity. My instruments mimic the visual vocabulary of standardization while quietly subverting its behavioral expectations.
During the performance, I gave participants a facilitation cue: “Observe each other. Try to learn from what others are doing.” On the surface, this encouraged imitation as a method of learning. But because the instruments were different, imitation would inevitably fail. A gesture that worked on one instrument would produce an entirely different result on another. As a result, the act of copying became an engine for individual exploration, not reproduction.
This structure, I realized, mirrored a quiet resistance to standardized education. In many pedagogical models, “learning” is based on replication—students are expected to imitate a master or follow a textbook. My instruments intentionally broke that logic. Here, copying did not produce correctness. It produced confusion, which opened space for discovery. In this way, the instruments served as both a critique and an alternative to conventional learning models.