Syhamo and Sy~

As I mentioned in an earlier post, sculptor Oscar Wiggli is passionate about sounds. This passion, plus his wife Janine's interest in electronics, led to the creation of the Syhamo, a synthesizer interacting with its environment, the kind of project that was not so common at the beginning of the 1980s.

Last year, I had the great pleasure to see three students build and program a new version of the Syhamo: they called it Sy~. Together, we visited the Wigglis in Switzerland - see Antonin Segault's report with pictures of the actual Syhamo.

The visual dimension

The original Syhamo creates music reacting to temperature, distance from users, a.o.


How the Syhamo works: cover of the book Syhamo, published by Iroise.

The Sy~ goes further by synthesizing visuals as well as sounds. Here are examples from the original beta version:


Sy~ demo from Camille Henriot on Vimeo.



Art & Glitch

I was thrilled to learn that the three young professionals who created the Sy~ (Camille Henriot, Cédric Lanoir, and Antonin Segault) founded Art & Glitch, an organization dedicated to digital arts. Check on their web site their story about Syhamo & Sy~.

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