spore. Follow the build

An instrument that grows its own music.

Spore is a battery-powered generative synth the size of a paperback: thirteen knobs, a touch keyboard, a round display, and a Daisy Seed inside. It's open hardware, and it isn't finished. Follow along while it gets built.

Spore seen from the front left: a bone-white wedge with a black top panel, grey knobs around a round display, and a gold touch keyboard along the front edge.

The screen shows what you touch

A 1.28″ round display in the middle of the panel: the mode and tempo, the knob you just turned, and the sound's level rising up both sides.

Generative, on an external clock.
Turn a knob and the screen shows it.
Bypass, at a glance.

Three boards and a printed shell

The gold keys aren't parts sitting on a panel. They are the circuit board itself: bare copper you play with your fingertips.

Under it sits a second board that carries the knobs and the display, and below that the core, with the audio brain, the battery charger and every socket. One flat cable joins them.

  • Sound Daisy Seed, 24-bit stereo
  • Hands 13 knobs, 13 keys, a bend strip
  • Power Rechargeable cell, USB-C
  • Wires Headphones, line in, a built-in mic, MIDI, clock

From every side

These are renders from the design files, not photographs. Photos replace them the day the first unit exists.

Front view of Spore.
Knobs at the back, keys at the front, tilted seven degrees toward you.
All the way round, then with the cables in.
Close view of the round display between the knobs.
The display names what the six left knobs do right now.
Back of Spore with its sockets.
Everything plugs in at the back. The labels sit on the panel, right above each socket.
Underside of Spore with a two-colour decal of shards, threads and dots.
The underside is printed in two colours: shards, threads and drifting spores.
Spore listens. It catches the pulse and mood of the room around it and grows music of its own from what it hears, never quite the same twice.

Finishes

Studies for the shell. The printed base can take any colour; anodised aluminium and walnut are ideas we're exploring.

Spores leaning on one another like fallen dominoes in a gentle arc, each base a different colour: blue, violet, pink, red, orange, yellow and white.
One instrument, any colour you print it in.
Spore with a matte, silver anodised aluminium base.
Bead-blasted, clear-anodised aluminium.
Spore with an oiled dark walnut base.
Oiled walnut, the grain running along the keys.

Where it is now

  1. Designed

    All three circuit boards are drawn, and every chip has been checked against its datasheet.

  2. First prototypes

    Waiting for the first boards. When they arrive, one unit gets soldered, put in its printed shell and powered up for the first time.

  3. First sound and software

    Write the code for the sound engine, the display, the touch keys and the knobs, until it plays.

  4. Propagator

    Connect Spore to Propagator, the browser editor: patches and parameters from your laptop, over USB.

  5. Public evaluation

    Put units in players' hands and listen to what they say.

Get the next update

An email goes out when a step above is finished, or when something goes wrong in an interesting way.