Sound Werkshop's Wiggler Is an "Expressive Synth" with Flexure-Based Jiggly Key Bed

Semi-pseudonymous musician and maker Chris, of Sound Werkshop, is in the process of building a 3D-printed "expressive synth" designed to get some interesting sounds out of a Daisy Seed development board — and he's called it the Wiggler.

"It's an expressive synthesizer," Chris explains of the project, "which means it's an electronic music instrument that tries to take inspiration from the expressiveness of acoustic instruments. For example, on a violin, with your fingering hand, you can wiggle for a vibrato effect, and [with] your bowing hand you can press more firmly and move the bow faster to make a note louder. So, the goal of this is to make synthesizers feel more alive."

The Wiggler itself is a compact desktop synth in a 3D-printed chassis and powered by the Electrosmith Daisy Seed, which launched three years ago. Based on an STMicroelectronics STM32 running at up to 480MHz and with a generous 64MB of external SDRAM and 8MB of flash, the Daisy Seed includes two line-level audio input and output channels with support for 24-bit 192kHz sampling plus MIDI input and output — making it ideal for audio projects like the Wiggler.

"It's a monophonic instrument," Chris says of the Wiggler's design, "and I decided to only give you notes belonging to one scale to make it a bit more friendly and compact. To extend the range a bit we've got some momentary octave up and down buttons. The heart of the machine is something called the 'flexure.' So, a flexure is a mechanism where you take a rigid piece of material and cut it in a certain way [to] allow it to actually flex in a controlled manner."

These flexures, Chris explains, are connected to the key bed in order to allow the keys to move not only up and down as with a standard keyboard but left and right too — enabling the sort of wiggle-based vibrato normally associated with string instruments. Hall effect sensors measure the horizontal and vertical movement of each key, providing inputs to modify the synth patch and tweak the output in real-time.

"I am actually on a mission to try to turn this into a product," Chris says of the Wiggler, though at the time of writing no launch date or pricing had been disclosed. More information is available on the Sound Werkshop YouTube channel.