Quintonics have released a new synth…. that’s controlled by the elements!
The Weather Warlock is a low voltage synthesiser designed by Quintonics, founded by Robert Rolston AKA Quintron. The Weather Warlock uses an array of sensors to pick up rain, sun, wind etc and the analogue synth translates them into a series of tones that relate to the source. Currently the Weather Warlock sits on a beach in New Orleans and broadcasts its tones and harmonies all hours of the day via its own website Weather For The Blind.
The Weather Warlock is actually an upgrade of a previous idea of Rolston’s. The Singing House was the first incarnation, Rolston applied a similar idea to his own home.
The Weather Warlock’s aim is to connect humans to nature through producing drone harmonics reflective of the natural environment. The name itself, Weather for the Blind is a reference to a circadian rhythm sleep disorder suffered by ‘sight impaired persons,’ as one of the goals of the Weather Warlock is to assist those with such problems, or to just help ‘anyone suffering from stress or health issues.’
“I wanted to capture the perfection of nature and translate that into sound. Like Gaudi, I was looking to the tree in the yard for inspiration as opposed to other music or artists.” – Rolston
Rolston plans to take the Weather Warlock on the road to feature in some performances, such as the upcoming Quinton & Miss Pussycat tour, where artists will improvise with the synth’s tones and harmonies. But fear not, there will be another synth moored in New Orleans beaming the elemental sounds to the Weather For The Blind stream.
It’s been said that the Weather Warlock is only an evolutionary step in Rolston‘s grand scheme. The next step is to hopefully utilise the Human body in a similar fashion! Rolston’s fellow sound engineer Marshall Brown explains, “I currently have plans and experiments in the works gathering EEG-like data to create personal emotion based sound synthesis, this involves dynamic inputs but not quite kinetic per se.”
The Weather Warlock has opened up new concepts of production as well as connecting humans to nature on a new level. If they are successful with stage 2 will it evolve the way humans connect to music?
Written by Alex Lewis
