The KiloDrone Features a Thousand Individual Oscillators

Oscillators are essentially the most basic electronic devices capable of synthesizing sound. All sound is the result of waves moving through a physical medium, like air. An oscillator is just a simple device capable of producing those waves. The frequency of the wave determines the pitch, while the amplitude of the wave correlates to the volume. The shape of the wave is what gives that synthesized sound its unique “feel.” Synthesizers generally have a handful of oscillators that can be adjusted to produce musical notes. Sam Battle, of the LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER YouTube channel, took that concept and ran with it to create the KiloDrone with one thousand individual oscillators.

You can purchase oscillators in the form of IC chips that are the size of the nail on your little finger. But additional hardware is required to actually take advantage of those chips. For instance, you’ll probably want control knobs and potentiometers to adjust the frequency and amplitude of each oscillator. You also need a way to get output the sound, which will necessitate the addition of patch jacks or something similar. In this case, each oscillator device is still fairly small, but putting 1,000 of them together ends up taking up an entire wall.

The KiloDrone oscillator wall was built using 100 modules, each of which contains 10 oscillators. Each of those oscillators has a knob for fine tuning pitch (frequency) and a knob for setting the volume (amplitude). Each of the panels also has an additional knob to adjust the overall tuning of the 10 oscillators contained in that module. That helps make it easier to tune all 1,000 oscillators to the same pitch. But they’re not perfect, which means there are small variations in their sound. When those variations are multiplied a thousand times over, you end up with a very noisy droning sound. Battle still has some work to do on the KiloDrone before he makes it accessible to the public, but the scale of this project is already very impressive.