An experimental instrument from SOMA Laboratory reads metal objects placed on its surface, turning their size, shape and position into sound.
SOMA Laboratory’s Enigma is now shipping, and it plays like nothing else on a desk – by placing and moving metal objects across its surface. Whatever is in your studio drawers becomes the controller, whether it’s coins, screws, gears, bolts, offcuts.
Having first appeared at Superbooth26 in May, Enigma is an instrument that reads metal through a sensing field, a scanner that picks up objects resting on the surface or held within 20mm of it. The size, shape and type of each object changes the result, and the field is sensitive enough that a shift of a fraction of a millimetre moves the sound. Eight touch sensors switch between operating states, each a different way of reading the same field, so the same handful of objects can be heard several ways.
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There is no set method to playing the Enigma. SOMA compares playing it to a game of go or chess, an open board where different players land on different sounds and different ideas about what the instrument even does. Much of what Enigma can do is left for the player to find through experimenting. Since the whole point is metal touching the instrument, SOMA built the playing surface to take a beating. It uses a scratch-resistant industrial film, and was put to the test for three nine hour days at Superbooth26, where visitors played it with every kind of object they could find. Around the back are a 3.5mm headphone output, left and right 6.3mm outputs that fold to mono if you patch only one, a 3.5mm Eurorack-compatible CV clock input and MIDI over DIN. It runs on 12V DC, and MIDI note control and clock sync let it lock to the rest of a rig.
Enigma follows the LYRA-8, the drone synth that put Vlad Kreimer’s boutique company on the map after he founded it in 2016.
For more information, head to SOMA.
