George Gleixner made a homemade battery-powered synthesizer for only $70 using a circuit bent from a children’s Hing Hon EK-001 squarewave keyboard. Nice.

Each year at Moogfest, as an homage to founder Bob Moog, there’s a circuit bending competition in which entrants hack together their instruments for a shot at maker glory. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the larger festival attracts electronic music’s finest, like Kraftwerk and Dan Deacon, that could end up peeking the goods too. This time around, Mr. Gleixner took the top prize and we caught up with him to see the inner workings of his creation.

The winning machine is called the ‘The Weather Warlock’ and gets its input signals from variations outside, monitored by a collection of meteorological sensors. When employed, the set-up can produce sounds based on changes in temperature, wind, sunlight and rain, using a pleasant E major chord as the base and piping in unique tones for sunrise and sunset. i

It’s also constantly live streamed over the web so you can get some background noise whenever you like. The goal is to eventually have a handful of stations scattered across the globe so that listeners can enjoy a variety ambient weather-based tunes.

Listen to ‘Weather for the blind’ here.

[Source: engadget]