Most instruments that promise to turn everyday objects into music are contact microphones with a preamp. You tap the thing, you hear the tap, amplified. It is fun for about ten minutes.
The Fluxophone — from Magpie Audio Devices, introduced by Simon The Magpie — is the other half of that idea. It doesn’t just listen to the object. It drives it, and then listens, and then feeds what it heard back in.
Simon The Magpie’s introduction and demonstration.
It is described as an electroacoustic feedback and reverb generator, and sells for roughly $240 USD (2,400 SEK).
What “electroacoustic feedback” means here
Take an object — a radiator, a sheet of metal, a wooden table, a wine glass, a filing cabinet. Attach a transducer that vibrates it, and a pickup that hears it. Route the pickup back into the transducer.
Now you have a loop that runs through physics rather than through a DSP algorithm. The object’s own resonant modes decide which frequencies survive the trip and which die. Feed it enough gain and the loop sustains — and what sustains is whatever that particular object happens to be good at ringing at.
This is why it sounds “haunted,” and why the word is apt rather than marketing. The tone is not synthesised and not sampled. It is the object’s own resonance, held open by a feedback loop that keeps re-exciting it. Pitch depends on the object’s size and stiffness. Decay depends on its damping. Damp it with your hand and the character changes continuously, in a way no filter envelope does.
The “reverb generator” half is the same mechanism at lower gain: below the threshold of sustained oscillation, the object is simply a physical reverb chamber with a genuinely strange impulse response.
The lineage, which is long
This is not new territory — it is territory with a distinguished history that mostly nobody has turned into a product.
Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969) is the canonical piece: record a voice in a room, play it back into the room, record that, repeat until the room’s resonant modes are all that remains. The Fluxophone does the same thing to an object instead of a room, continuously instead of iteratively.
David Tudor’s feedback systems, Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968), and the whole no-input-mixer tradition all live in the same family: a loop where the interesting behaviour is the system’s, not the player’s.
More recently, transducer-driven resonance is the basis of instruments like the Feedback Guitar tradition (Fripp, Belew, anyone with a Sustainiac or an EBow) and installation work by artists who bolt exciters to architecture and let buildings ring.
What the Fluxophone changes is access. All of the above required building something. A $240 box with a transducer, a pickup and a gain stage that will not immediately destroy itself makes this a technique you can try on a Tuesday afternoon.
What makes it an interface rather than an effect
The control surface is the object and your hands on it.
That is the part worth dwelling on. With a synth, you learn the panel. With this, you learn the radiator — where to clamp for the fundamental, where to touch to kill the third partial, how much pressure moves the pitch, which end of the table is bright and which is dull. The instrument is different in every room, and the knowledge you build is not transferable to the next object.
That is either a serious limitation or the entire appeal, depending on temperament. It puts the Fluxophone in the same category as a prepared piano or a no-input mixer: an instrument whose behaviour you negotiate with rather than program. For installation work it is especially attractive, because the object can be the artwork — the piece and its sound source are the same thing, and the sound is site-specific by construction.
Practical cautions
Feedback systems at gain are genuinely capable of hurting your ears and your gear. Start low. Keep a hand on the level. And be aware that the loud, exciting behaviour is usually at the edge of stability, which means it will find the edge by itself while you are reaching for a knob.