Inventor Builds Spooky Synth With Chattering Plastic Teeth

Christmas is fast approaching, which means it's time for children to go door-to-door to sing carols while keeping their social distance. Perhaps, taking inspiration from their singing through chattering teeth in the cold weather of December and mixing it with the true Halloween spirit, Swedish designer Love Hultén has created rows of chattering teeth to bring the vocal synthesizer experience to life; possibly creating the most fitting soundtrack for 2020.

A choir of chattering plastic teeth

The designer is an audiovisual artist and instrument inventor who frequently pays tribute to retro gaming and classic computing with handmade creations. His latest design VOC-25, with its simple color palette of pale pink, blood-red, and dentist white, looks gloriously creepy and makes the viewer feel straight out of a retro, 1960s horror movie. It was inspired by a concept from Swedish YouTuber Simone Giertz.

The VOC-25 is a vocal synthesizer that utilizes an Axoloti Core circuit board and 25 sets of plastic teeth, each set representing a different note on the keyboard. It looks like a desktop computer with the three main components housed in wood.

RAW vocal audio samples are fed into the main console via USB, creating a personal voicebank, per Hultén's website. The Axoloti board ins and outs MIDI via the 25-key keyboard and these signals are then "converted to DC current via control boards located inside the monitor segment", Hultén writes.

SEE ALSO: MUSICIAN HACKS PROSTHETIC ARM TO CONTROL SYNTHESIZER AND PLAYS MUSIC WITH HIS THOUGHTS

There are built-in speakers for standalone use and mono outputs in the back which are "a good way to reduce mechanical noise."

You can watch Hultén playing the VOC-25 in the video below:

This isn't the only design by Love Hultén though. He has many other designs and not all of them are this creepy. You can check out this marble-dropping music box which produces the most complex sounds you can ever hear here.