Hyve Touch Synthesizer (Sneak Preview)

hyve-touch-synthesizer

Electronic instrument designer Skot Wiedmann recently shared a video, below, that demonstrates a new synth design, the Hyve Touch Synthesizer:

The Hyve Touch Synthesizer is a polyphonic analog instrument with 3 axis touch control.

Some of the features of Hyve include: control for timbre and octave, chord groups (major and minor), pitch bends, easily tune-able and portable board (runs on 9V battery or 6-15V AC adapter) with an audio jack.

Here’s how Wiedmann describes it:

A synthesizer that responds to your touch! Slide your fingers up and down the keys and make the sound morph and shift as it senses your smallest movements in 3 dimensions.

This polyphonic analog synthesizer can play 60 notes in stereo, all controlled by your touch.

Details are to come, but the Hyve has previously been introduced at DIY workshops, where you could build your own instrument for US $40.

You can sign up to get updates about the Hyve via Wiedmann’s site.

via CDM

18 thoughts on “Hyve Touch Synthesizer (Sneak Preview)

    1. no way. not even usb to midi. for $40? a midi kit alone is more than that. also you get a pretty good look at the back frame in the video. no space for it.

      1. It costs about a couple of quid to add midi to a digital board, and that’s at non-bulk prices. All the components required are the DIN sockets, a couple of resistors, and an optocoupler; Not even that if you just want midi out, as the midi spec doesn’t require an optocoupler on the outputs.

        1. It does say it’s analog though. Presumably it has a digital board to implement whatever the key scanning technology is but who knows.

          I’m mostly interested in CV but that gets tricky with polyphony.

          Also interested in where the polyphony is coming from, is it like an old school transistor organ with a bunch of divide down circuits?

          1. Interesting discussion. This is one area that Midi has some serious limitations. How do you encode 60 voices each with pressure, horizontal, vertical and pitch bend parameters per note? Is there a way to do it that is compatible with most of the Midi synthesizers that are available?

    2. MIDI can’t really handle 64 notes with individual expression, can it? Wouldn’t the instrument need to be limited to 16 notes and also need to support MPE?

      Seems like that would probably quadruple the price of this thing, or more.

  1. What a funky idea at a cool price. But the sounds are sure to become tired, very quickly. It is only tempting to me; as a controller. Fingers crossed!

  2. Come on let’s get realistic here, this is not a ‘synthesiser’ by any stretch of the imagination- more like as someone has already said, a Stylophone. And yes, shame it doesn’t send MIDI.

    1. What do you mean? It uses a type of finger controlled additive synthesis of non sinusoidal waveforms – a bit like the Trautonium, but polyphonic and no stylus.

  3. Just like a piano, trumpet, harp, oud, viola, oboe can become tiring after hundreds of years :))

    True, this instrument perhaps is not as expressive as these other examples, but as far as I am concerned, it is never the instrument that is tiring, but what is played with it.

    I like instruments that do one thing/one sound, but do it really well. This may or may not be one of them. We’ll wait and see. Looks very promising though.

  4. How about just appreciating it for what it is and not wanting all kinds of cv outs and midi and expecting it for $40….Some people are just never satisfied and want to extract every last pennies worth of value out of something.
    The product is great and a steal at $40 – I will be buying one and appreciating what it can do.

  5. If this had a simple sine oscillator mode, then it would be pretty easy to create a dsp that read the audio and created signals for multiple voices on other devices. Even with a more complex waveform, it’s probably doable. And I think it’s fine that people see something, then see a tonne of possibility – thats how innovation happens.

    Still, it looks delightful just as it is.

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