Built and designed by Peter Blasser from Ciat-Lonbarde, the Karper is a one of a kind solar powered (or dc 12v) Karpluss-Strong synthesizer with built in speaker that will melt your heart.

The Tocante line of musical instruments is "about" and "touching" the materials of electronics. Each touchpad represents a pitch according to industry "preferred numbers," chosen by old wartime engineers for non-musical purposes. Here they form a unique and haunting musical scale, not unlike that of a gamelan or the neutral intervals of Persian music. Beyond these base pitches, three golden sandrodes flank each touchpad; touching these androgynous nodes yields intermodulation, pitch and timbral shifts, and emergent chaotic masses. The instruments come in three flavors: thyris the triangle, bistab the square, and phashi the circle. The oscillators sound like a bowed string, a most powerful clarinet, and a howling serene whistle, respectively. Each responds to touch differently. Solar panels charge the onboard batteries, that power the oscillators and a speaker. They are the perfect self-contained instrument for nightly music at the campground.

Karper is the newest idea, using 24 separate 8bit microcontrollers to do that many parallel Karpluss-Strong string synthesizers, in the tocante scale. Each string has a trigger and two sources of "the noise of computation" or the least significant, hairiest bits magnified as 1bit music (T.P.) These can be output to the trigger, or two circuit-bending nodes that change the octave and pitch degree, or simply listen to the noise of computation on a braided, inner pre-amp.

Dimensions: 28x8x2 centimeters.

Range: 24 notes, four octaves.

Power: 6x300mah NiMH cells.

Diffusion: 0.5watt speaker.

Output: 3.5mm mono audio jack.

Cloudy Day: 2.1mm tip-positive 12vdc power jack (PSU included)