Eternal Research's Demon Box Turns Anything Electronic Into an Instrument — By Sampling EMF

Anything that can be picked up by an inductor is now an instrument, thanks to a 10-year development process in innovative music creation.

Gareth Halfacree
3 months agoMusic

Eternal Research is looking to put a little chaos in your music with a gadget dubbed the Demon Box — which transforms electromagnetic fields (EMF) into audio, aided not by horned creatures by by an array of 33 inductors, turning everything from hairdryers to smartphones into instruments.

"So much of western music is in reference to four-time signatures and shapes of plug-ins and devices most always revolve around squares and rectangles," Eternal Research founder and Demon Box co-creator Alexandra Fierra explains. "The triangle shape allows for a different orientation than what we’re used to. I believe that the physical design of something influences its use. I knew the design of the Demon Box needed to be original and promote out-of-the-box thinking to create music like you’ve never heard."

The Demon Box turns almost anything into an instrument, thanks to a triangular array of 33 inductors. (📹: Eternal Research)

Ten years in the making, the current Demon Box is indeed triangular — and houses 33 inductors that pick up electromagnetic radiation from nearby devices. Wave anything electronic near it, and the changes in the electromagnetic fields are translated into noise — transferred over independent mono channels for each side of the inductor array, one mixable stereo channel, three CV outputs, a USB output, or a MIDI output, all of which can be used simultaneously.

It's a long way away from the original prototype, created by Fierra and collaborator Bryn Nieboer: a six-inch wooden box housing an active bass guitar pickup. It took seven iterations to land on the triangular arrangement of inductors, which in turn led to the idea of three independent outputs. The launch version is the 13th Demon Box iteration, and the most advance — yet Fierra claims it's immediately accessible to all.

Anything that can be detected by an inductor can be used as an input to the Demon Box. (📹: Eternal Research)

"The Demon Box is an open palette," Fierra claims, "and I didn't want my design decisions to limit people’s view. I wanted to keep the complexity and noise in plain view, so that they can experience these phenomena and realize that the noise can be a good thing. The chaos is the music, or the seed of all new music."

Eternal Research is crowdfunding production of the Demon Box on Kickstarter, with rewards starting at $549 for early bird backers — a claimed 32 percent discount on the planned retail price — and hardware expected to ship in March next year.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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