A synthesizer
made of light.
Fourteen keys of frosted glass, a filter carved from frost, and an aurora that listens. LUMEN turns touch into tone — and tone back into weather.
play with Z–M and A–J · drag the knobs · the sky responds
About the instrument — glass, wired for sound.
LUMEN-01 began as a question in our Reykjavík studio: what would a synthesizer sound like if it were made of weather? Not metal, not wood — the pale green fire that moves over the winter sky. Every voice you play here is two oscillators, gently detuned, poured through a lowpass filter the way light pours through frosted glass.
The panel is not a picture of an instrument. It is the instrument. The echo knob feeds the delay line and the aurora at once — turn it up and the sky begins to remember its own shapes. Open the cutoff and the whole horizon warms. Nothing here is decoration; every surface is wired to the signal.
Leave it alone and LUMEN plays itself — a slow generative arpeggio in C, written by no one, different every time.
Specifications
Playing guide — three ways in.
Play the keys
Click any glass key, or use your keyboard: Z–M covers the low octave, A–J the high one. Hold for sustain; every note casts a ripple of light and releases a mote into the sky.
Shape the light
Drag a knob vertically to turn it. Cutoff warms the aurora's hue, Echo makes the sky trail and remember, Bloom is the size of the hall, Wave chooses the voice's character.
Let it drift
The arpeggiator writes a slow generative line in C major — no two passes alike. Set the tempo between 56 and 152 BPM, then switch it off whenever you want the room to yourself.
Signal path — from touch to twilight.
A deliberately short chain. Two detuned oscillators per voice, one filter for the whole instrument, then time: a feeding delay line and a convolution hall rendered from generated noise — no samples, no recordings, just mathematics decaying gracefully.