The Aldean Instrument

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Hi everybody, this is Alex, host of HyperFixed.

I just wanted to drop something at the top of the episode really quick for a couple of reasons.

And the first is to say that we are unlocking a premium episode as our main feed episode this week, which is not something we were originally planning on doing.

We were working on a story that we expected to run, and frankly, it kind of got away from us.

I don't know how else to say it.

One of the weird things about making a radio story is that sometimes you can sit down, do a bunch of interviews, and feel like there's a through line in it, a beginning, a middle, an end, just like some satisfaction to it.

And then when you sit down to write it, you're like, wait, I have more questions.

I need to talk to more people.

This story needs to go back in the oven.

And that's what happened with the episode that was planned for this week.

We're not abandoning it.

It will come out.

but you know, when you're a staff of four, sometimes another story can be kicked into high gear and put out, but we just didn't have anything in the hopper that was quite finished enough.

So we are running a premium episode that we released a couple weeks ago, and it's a very fun one because it came out of our interview that we did with Astrid, the person who wrote in for our fonts story, which aired on the main feed.

Uh, what the what's the name of the font story?

What's the name of the fonts episode?

Hyperfixed fonts.

I'm googling my own show because I don't know the name of the show.

Little by little.

There we go.

So I was interviewing Astrid

for Little by Little, the episode about the missing font that she wanted to find.

And during the course of that interview, she told me something so weird that I was just like, oh, this is a bonus episode.

This rules.

Astrid is so charming and she's like so smart and creative.

I could have talked to her forever.

But anyway, this is a great one.

And, you know, this is sort of also like a backdoor advertisement for our premium feed.

If you like this, there are almost 20 bonus episodes floating around out there.

So, you know, hyperfixedpod.com/slash join to get access to all of those, among many other things.

The other thing I wanted to let you know is we are in the middle of summer and people are going on vacation.

We are going to be out of town.

So our next main feed episode is going to be a feed drop from my friend Jane Marie, who hosts a podcast called The Dream.

That podcast is fantastic, and you should definitely listen to that episode.

And if you are a premium listener, you will continue to get bonus episodes during the course of these couple of weeks.

And the last thing, which is very important, is that we are working on a banger of an episode that we are extremely excited about that is going to be released on July 17th.

It's going to be our first two-part episode, which is really exciting for us.

We're really stoked for it.

And after that, you know, our production schedule is going to go back to normal until the next time that we can't finish a story in time.

So I think that's it.

This week is an unlocked premium episode.

The next main feed is going to be Jane from the Dream.

And then the following main feed episode is going to be this banger episode that we're losing our minds about.

So hopefully it lives up to the expectations I've just set.

I hope you enjoy this one.

And even if you're a premium listener and you've already heard this one, please listen to the end because we received a message from Astrid herself with an update about the font from the episode little by little.

We will see you very soon,

and we really appreciate you listening.

And we are very excited for the stuff that's coming up, including the episode that we had to scuttle for this week because we weren't ready.

Okay, enjoy.

Talk to you soon.

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So, last week on the show, we met Astrid, and Astrid was on a quest to find a font.

But not just any font, it was a font that she, and perhaps only she, considered to be a work of art.

And together, we somehow dug that font up from the depths of history, little by little.

And if you don't get that reference, you just got to go back and listen to the episode.

It's a fun one.

They're all fun.

Come on, let's be honest.

They're all fun, right?

We're all that's why you're paying for this.

They're all all fun.

Now, when we first talked to Astrid, I was struck by how sort of deeply she observes the world.

Like, she doesn't just notice what the font looks like, whether she likes it aesthetically.

She really sees it for how it functions in the world and for who it serves and why.

She broke down that font like someone analyzing, I don't know, a symphony or an ancient language or something.

But the more we talked, the more I realized, like, this skill of hers is not just limited to fonts.

Astra just sees the world in a way that I do not.

I mean, at least not the visual world.

Her brain is tuned to some frequency that my brain will not catch.

And I'm sure some of that is because she's a designer.

Like, she helped found this company called Bella, which is a platform for building interactive audio tools, including a tool or two that I now use to help score the show.

But like, even how she talks about her job is telling.

Like, on her professional website, she describes her work as exploring the poetry in everyday things and the connections between people and their environments.

That sounds like the smart version of what I do on a dumb level every day on the show.

Like, I'm trying to understand the connection between people and the world and each other.

But, like, I do that through their stories.

I don't do that through their objects.

That is like beautiful to me.

And I don't even know fully how one would do that, but it's how I want to live so this week i wanted to share more of our conversation because i came to find out it wasn't just this font that she fixates on it wasn't just this font that she enjoyed the design of and wanted to interrogate further astrid has been on a similar quest before just a few years earlier

Um, okay, during the pandemic, I watched a shitload of Star Trek because there was nothing else to do.

Which series specifically, all of them?

We started at TNG.

That, of course, is Astrid.

The TNG she's talking about is Star Trek The Next Generation, which was the second live-action Star Trek franchise, which aired from 1987 to 1994.

I do not care for the original series.

So we started at TNG.

And I, you know, I make musical instruments.

I research musical instruments.

Musical instruments is what I do.

So I started tracking the musical instruments in Star Trek.

And all of them are horrible, like just ridiculous.

Okay, so one more thing.

So I've told you you that Astrid works for a company that makes digital sounds and instruments.

And so when she goes on her Star Trek rewatch journey, she's been designing instruments for more than 10 years.

And because of her work, she's someone who's really focused on the subtleties of how things function and as a result, sound.

And that's what got her so frustrated while watching Star Trek, is that it's clear to her that the people designing the instruments on the show didn't consider if or how these devices would even work.

For example, they would play tiny little instruments, but out of them would come huge bellowing sounds, just things that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

But just when she thought the designers had totally lost her trust, she watches season one, episode seven of The Next Generation, When the Bow Breaks, and a new instrument is introduced.

You ended up recreating it in physical space.

Do you have it handy?

No, not on me.

It's in a box under my bed.

Can you tell me what the name of the instrument is so I can look it up?

It's called the Aldean Instrument.

Aldean?

A-L-D-E-A-N?

Yes.

Instrument.

All I'm getting is Jason Aldean.

Who the fuck is that?

Star Trek.

Is it this rainbow thing?

Yes.

It looks like a frisbee with a grip on it, and then it's got sort of like rainbow keys on either side.

Is it like a piano style instrument no you play it with your mind

no actually no

i i no that that's actually another i'm mixing them up it you don't play it with your mind you play it with your mood

yeah okay that makes sense you play it with your mood

did exactly what i thought

and felt yes it's a direct reflection of the music within now we just have to teach you to structure that feeling.

Try it again.

That was beautiful.

Now,

play something happy.

It's also, when I started researching it and I started looking around, it's the only one that has a design credit.

And it's this production designer who worked on

Star Trek.

And he's still working.

He designed the DeLorean and Back to the Future.

Like, he's done a lot of stuff.

And I got a hold of him because he's still working.

and i was like i'm a musical instrument researcher i'm really interested in this can you tell me anything about this instrument and he went no i don't remember anything but i did find my production sketches and he sent me the production sketches so i ended up recreating it but i was so excited to find this guy and like his work is so beautiful and i was so jazzed about this and and he was like i don't remember anything but he did send me the production sketches which are beautiful they're amazing so astrid gets these sketches which she's right, are like totally awesome.

But they only show a couple angles of the Rainbow Frisbee thing.

There's a sketch with a hand holding it to show how it should be used and some indications where lights and buttons should go.

But that's about it.

I mean, it leaves a lot up to interpretation.

And so Astrid starts trying to make this thing, this instrument, in the real world and actually make it work.

And based on everything that you know about Astrid, I'm sure it's no surprise to hear hear that she does it.

For the most part.

Did you make it functional?

Yeah.

How does it work?

I assume that it doesn't play off based off your mood.

No, I used a Bella.

And basically, what I did was I recreated what was in the show, and which is just, it plays as like various parts of a G major chord, I believe, in this kind of like sparkly sort of sound.

And what I did was I thought about

how could it read your mood?

Because in the show, they kind kind of lay their hand across the middle and then it starts to play.

And if you get angry, then it makes a horrible noise and stops.

So I had a touch sensor underneath the grip.

And depending on how hard you gripped the touch sensor and how many fingers you had on it, it would rise in intensity.

And if you moved it really quickly, it had an accelerometer that could detect sudden motion.

And then it would just like descend into noise.

Oh my God, you're from the fucking future, dude.

It's really simple, actually.

It's not that.

I understand, but like, I do have a question, which is like, why was it important to you to try and redesign this instrument?

And like, what did you learn from it?

Like, what did you as a designer learn from doing this?

I think that, I mean, I've made a lot of digital instruments.

And one of the things that is a real struggle with digital instruments is what should they sound like?

Because if a computer's making the sound, there's no physical reason that an instrument should sound like anything.

Like, you just like make up some sounds, and it doesn't always make sense.

And so so it's very hard to sort of give yourself something to hold on to.

Like why would it sound like this?

Like give yourself a reason, like anchor it somewhere.

And when I started looking at these Star Trek instruments, what I found really interesting about them was like, if I'm going to recreate it, it doesn't matter what I want it to sound like.

I need it to embody the vibe.

that it was intended to have as a storytelling device, which is a very different way to think about an instrument because usually you're like, oh, a musician needs this or blah blah blah blah blah whereas the only purpose of the those instruments was vibes and so that's a very interesting and different way to think about instrument design

you are a a type of person who i think is uh not a me type of person, which is like you look at things and are constantly wondering at why they were built the way they were.

Yeah.

I was the only time I ever have that feeling is when I come up against something that doesn't work properly for me.

Other than that, like I'm not thinking about the way things are designed.

I'm not thinking about the way my audio interface was designed or my microphone or anything or the way that applications I use on the computer look visually.

But like that is, you're definitely always thinking about that stuff.

Yeah, there's a reason for all of this.

What does it feel like navigating the world constantly interrogating all the choices that have been made for everything that you're using?

I'm like, I understand that it's like your default state.

It's hard to figure out what it's like to do that.

But, like, do you feel like dissatisfied with just about everything you're using?

No, I think I feel fascinated with things.

That's great.

I'm envious, extremely envious, because I'm usually just like, wow, it's time to fire up the thing.

Okay, the thing is running the way it's supposed to.

You know, like, every once in a while, I get called into meetings where they're like, do you have design suggestions for how to make the website that you guys use at Hyperfix more useful?

And I'm like,

no, I don't know.

You know, make more people sign up for premium.

I don't know.

I don't know what the answer is.

Like, can you get a guy who goes to people's houses and bullies them into signing up for the premium accounts?

I just, I'm like, honestly, a little jealous because I don't think about that stuff at all.

I mean, that's not entirely true.

But like, I have never once thought.

Why is a font designed the way it is?

I have never once thought, why is a fictional instrument designed the way it is?

Like, that's a level of granularity that I'm not thinking about.

I love it.

I love it.

But because Astrid is someone who thinks in that way and can articulate it so well, the group behind the Audio Developers Conference reached out to her and asked her to tell her story about this instrument at their annual event in 2022.

So, thanks to the folks at ADC, here is Astrid's keynote speech at the Audio Developers Conference 2022 in the UK about

this Star Trek instrument.

Stick around to the end for an audio demonstration of Astrid's version of the Aldean instrument.

I'm here today to present Where a Few Designs Have Gone Before: Lessons I've Learned in Digital Instrument Design from Star Trek.

And first off, I'd like to say thank you very much to ADC for inviting me and even more for saying yes to this topic.

I do appreciate it.

So

for those of you that don't know me, me, my name's Astrid, and I'm a designer, a developer, and an instrument maker.

I tried to make this like butcher baker candlestick maker.

I couldn't do it.

So that's the best I can do.

I'm also a music technology researcher at Ableton in Berlin.

And I'm also a founding member of the team that built Bella.io and continues to build Bella.io, which is an embedded hardware platform.

And

in this talk, I'm going to, this talk is in four parts.

First of all, I'm going to talk about Star Trek instruments, because there's a lot of them, and how I got interested in them and what really grabbed me about these things, and what I found out about one instrument in particular that really grabbed me.

And then the process of prototyping that instrument, and then some of the things I learned through that whole process.

So part one is discovering Trek instruments.

Now, my doctoral research was on digital musical instruments, building digital musical instruments, and as a result, I pay really close attention to musical instruments whenever I see them.

And there's a lot of instruments in science fiction because it's a general assumption that making music is an integral part of all culture, not just human culture.

And sometimes these are kind of believable.

You're like, all right, yeah, I can see how that's an instrument.

And sometimes they're really ridiculous.

But something happened in March 2020.

Now, I don't know if you remember where you were in March 2020, but I sure do because as we all know, that was the beginning of the pandemic.

And everything was canceled.

We were all stuck at home and nobody knew how long it would last.

And I remember having a conversation with my partner, and I said to him, we should probably find something on Netflix that's consistently fun to watch, that has a ton of episodes, and isn't too depressing, because we could be here for two months.

Adorable.

And what has lots of episodes is consistently fun to watch and not too depressing.

A, it's Star Trek.

So we decided to re-watch Star Trek starting from the beginning.

And I hadn't mainlined that much Star Trek in many years.

And because of this orientation I have towards musical instruments, I could not get over how many musical instruments there were in the show.

And the more I watched, the more I realized that these musical instruments served an important storytelling purpose.

They are all sometimes different, but there was always a storytelling purpose.

And in the original series, the musical instruments are a bit silly, a bit of light-hearted entertainment.

But it seems that the musical instruments are used to say something about humans as well as about the aliens the humans encounter.

In the original series, most instruments show us something about Vulcan culture.

These are Vulcan bells, and there was this really sweet part in, I don't know if anyone's seen Strange New Worlds.

It's so good, you should watch it, the brand new series.

It involves a young Spock, and he has one of these on his bedroom wall.

I thought that was really adorable.

But mostly, these instruments look a lot like human folk instruments, and that draws a parallel between Vulcan culture and human culture.

And ultimately, the instruments start out as giving us this larger cultural context for Vulcans, mostly that they like ritual, and apparently, they like a good folk jam.

And I also like how Spock's Vulcan harp has little knobs on it.

It's an old antique, but it's also high-tech, which says something about how long Vulcans have had sophisticated technology.

But the musical musical instruments really come into their own during the next generation.

It started in 87, went till 94, and they also feature in Voyager, which ran from 95 to 2001.

There's also a bunch in Deep Space Nine, Best Track,

but they're mostly Bajoran instruments.

So, I mean,

there's their own thing.

So, I'm going to talk mostly about TNG instruments with a little bit of Voyager.

And like the original series, there's music

uses this like light-hearted sort of comic relief, but there's also this notion that music symbolizes intelligence and that certain humans are very intelligent because they play music.

And many of the characters in Starfleet play instruments, which I think is an effort to communicate this well-roundedness.

They're genius scientists, but they're also...

musical.

And weirdly, the repertoire of highbrow music, like worthy, good, valuable music in the 21st century seems to mirror pretty perfectly highbrow, high-value, worthy music in the late 20th century.

But that's a whole other talk.

On Voyager, Harry Kim plays this ancient thing.

We all know

that Riker loves a trombone.

Even Picard plays the penny whistle.

And there's this really interesting part in TNG.

It's at the end.

He gets a girlfriend.

And the way that they kind of communicate that she's on his intellectual level is that she has this rubber roll-up piano and they go and she like unrolls it in the Jeffreys tube and they're going to like play together.

And I was a little kid when I saw this.

I was obsessed with this roll-up piano, obsessed.

And they they, but she's definitely on his level because they play together in the Jeffreys tube.

Very romantic.

And there's also this idea that music equals humanity.

It's used to communicate that non-humans are in fact have human nature.

Data is the ultimate example of this.

He's an android.

He's constantly subjecting his fellow crew members to concerts.

I mean, everyone looks really bored.

But music is one of many ways that he uses to try to understand human nature and try to incorporate it somehow.

And again,

the ancient instrument playing, like ancient instruments playing ancient repertoire is a strong cultural signifier.

And it's interesting still again how humanity's,

it's an interesting vision of humanity's future, that there's really been no progress in what we consider to be really important canonical music in a good 500 years.

But also, most importantly, there is this idea of music showing future...

Actually, this is second most important.

I'll catch the most important afterwards.

Got ahead of myself.

It shows a futuristic human culture, what happens to human culture as it evolves.

And

what what is recognizable as music.

This is one of my favorite episodes.

And in this episode, Picard visits the Parisian cafe and there's a wandering accordion player.

And this is what an accordion looks like in 500 years.

This thing.

For real.

I'm serious.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

This is

an accordion.

It sounds exactly like an accordion.

The sound hasn't evolved at all.

But now it's tubes attached to like some sort of car grill, I think.

I guess to suggest that it's like somehow acoustic and

air moves through it.

I've got a really, I didn't have time to put the good story in this talk, but if you're interested in this history of this instrument, catch me later.

So in this scene, Picard looks out in this futuristic Paris, and there's like a you know a hyper loop going underneath the Eiffel Tower, and it's all like future, future, future.

So this is like a vision of how humanity still stays consistent yet evolves somehow, I guess.

And there's also this the most important function we got there eventually is how music symbolizes culture that's human-ish and other alien species if they have music this is how we how the writers kind of symbolize this is sophisticated alien culture it doesn't just want to kill everybody they they have you know their culture they have music So there's a lot of examples of this.

The betazoid chime played by one of the greatest bit players in Trek history, Mr.

Hom,

who, and it's this weird tiny glass chime that he barely touches.

It makes this enormous noise that everybody hates.

It's how beta Z's give thanks for the food that they eat.

There's also this Algolian percussion instrument, which is like these chains of bones hanging down,

and this guy hits them with little hammers.

How those resonate, no idea.

I guess physics evolves too.

But it's a good thing they did because otherwise, how was Riker

going to signal to the Enterprise when he was kidnapped by the Ferengis?

But you got to watch season three, episode 24.

And there's also this good one.

This one is amazing from

Voyager.

It's an Inaran musical instrument.

Inarans are like this telepathic kind of people.

And the Inarans

play this musical instrument.

They play it with their minds.

And to be honest, I don't understand why they have to wave their hand over this weird orb if they're telepathic and they're playing it with their mind.

It makes no sense.

But a lot of these, they don't make any sense, but it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

they're just storytelling devices and

so there was one instrument and this is part two the instrument that i really got into and that i found really exciting and it's this one there is no instrument that is quite as good as the Aldean, it's an unnamed Aldean instrument.

And this is from season one, episode 16, called When the Bow Breaks.

And what happens is all the children on the Enterprise are kidnapped by these Aldeans who are all pretty old because they don't have any young people.

They haven't been able to reproduce for a long time.

They just steal the Enterprise's children, but they're really nice to them and they kind of distribute the children among all of these different families and this little girl ends up with this family of musicians and they teach her to play this instrument.

And spoiler alert, it was an environmental toxin all along.

They're fine now.

But also, I don't know if you notice what's in the background here of this music, this Aldean musician.

Oh, it's a Falcon harp.

So that's also symbolizing the Aldeans obviously had like, are very sophisticated.

They have contact with other alien races for a long time.

They can incorporate other alien cultures.

Fascinating.

But anyway, this instrument, and

it's on screen for a total of about four seconds.

It's this weird kind of disc thing that you put your hand on and then it reads your moods.

It reads your thoughts are translated through this instrument.

And it makes sparkly noises, makes noises that reflect the nature of your thoughts.

And I found this interesting for a bunch of reasons.

First of all, it looks really cool.

I was just like, that thing is really exciting to look at.

Secondly, it's on camera for four seconds, so like, you don't even get a good look at it.

So that was interesting.

I was like, oh, we'd have to make up all kinds of stuff.

It reads moods.

How does one do that?

But this is also the only instrument in the entirety of Star Trek that has a design credit.

And I found this out by research, because I was like, I need to know who designed

these instruments.

Nobody has any idea except this one.

And this was designed by a guy called Andrew Probert.

Has anyone heard of Andrew Probert?

That's what I thought, but I guarantee you've seen his work.

He designed, he's a production designer through the late 70s till he's still working now.

He designed the bridge for the next generation.

He designed, he worked on Battlestar Galactica in the 70s and the reboot in the early 1000s.

He designed the DeLorean for Back to the Future.

did most of the production design on Airwolf.

He's done basically any kind of mainstream science fiction.

He seems to have had something to do with.

And I found his website, so I sent him an email.

And I was like, So, Mr.

Probert,

what do you know about this instrument?

Do you remember it?

Can you tell me anything about it that I really want to know?

And very kindly, he replied to me and said, Can't remember a thing.

But

I've attached, I found, scanned, and attached my production design sketch.

And I was like, whoa, you need to go to his website.

Don't look at your phones right now.

I'll put a link at the end of the talk.

And this is, his drawings are so beautiful.

And this got me really excited because I was like, oh, that is such a cool looking thing.

How would you achieve that shape?

What would you make that out of?

Oh, look at the lights on the side.

So cool.

So that's when I got really, really super, super into it.

And

I realized that there was something happening here that usually, and I'm an instrument designer that tries to build unusual instruments, unusual materials, shapes, dimensions, that sort of thing, really push the material and physical aspects.

But I realized that my design thinking is always guided by this question.

What are the affordances of the technology that I have available?

Luckily, today we have a lot of small, embeddable, very powerful computers that you can do the sensor and sound processing on.

But still, it's about like, well, what sensors do I have?

And increasingly, it's about what can I get my hands on?

Because we're all familiar with the chip shortage.

And so, this, I realized, even though I tried to

buck these trends, I'm always kind of thinking about this.

Whereas this was not the point of this exercise.

I realized that if I was going to do something with this instrument,

I had to think about how do I achieve the vibe that the designer imagined, that they intended.

Because they didn't even design the sound.

They had no regard for whether it would actually work.

They didn't care what it sounded like.

These are storytelling visual devices.

They're props.

But they do make sound.

They did like weird sort of, I think the best adjective is vague sound design for all of these instruments.

Go back and listen to them.

You'll know what I mean.

And so that got me really interested because I was like, this is kind of flipping all this on its head.

I need to forget about the technology because the designers forgot about the technology.

They're just, they didn't care.

So then focus on what is it doing as an object?

What life does it have in the world?

So

now I'm going to tell you what I did to build it.

And I feel like, I feel like I need disclaimers all over this talk because we all know what Trek fans are like, don't we?

Don't we, fellow nerds?

Yes, I know.

And so I thought, okay, here, I need to tell you that this is a design exploration.

I wasn't looking to perfectly recreate this.

That's not the point.

The point was, how do I achieve this vibe?

What can I do for the vibe?

So if you want to come at me in Discord later,

my at is Bobby Lombardi.

I'm joking.

You'll find me.

So this is a design exploration.

This is a prototypical kind of thing.

So the goal was build an instrument that reflects the player's mood that kind of looks like the original design.

That's what I wanted to do.

And so I had to ask myself, well, what does it mean to read someone's moods?

And I kept having people say, well, are are you going to use like brainwave processing?

Or are you going to like, I don't know, how are you going to read somebody's mind?

And

it kind of started to make me worried because I was thinking, well, oh, Phil, am I underthinking this?

And I was like, well, doesn't the body sort of express moods in all kinds of ways?

And this whole kind of like read minds, I was like, meh.

They also don't say that in the episode.

They say it reflects your thoughts.

They don't say it reads your mind.

So I was like, meh.

And then something very interesting happened.

And I'm not on social media much anymore.

But somebody messaged me on Instagram, so I wanted to check the message.

And I do not install any social media app of any kind on my phone.

I only use it through the browser.

So I'm looking at the message.

And as I was trying to reply to the person, I dropped my phone on the sofa.

And I got this error message.

Rage shake.

Want to report a bug?

Don't forget to take a screenshot.

Oh, I took a screenshot.

I couldn't believe this.

I was like, what am I at?

It was like the, you know, but amazing.

So I guess like,

Instagram thinks that I'm doing this when I use their product, which I guess in many ways is true.

But it occurred to me that maybe my instinct here that like sensing mood could be done in various ways, that there's like other things that we can sense instead of like somebody's mood, but maybe a little more elegantly than Instagram.

So I started off with Abella, which is a Bella Mini, which is a tiny little embedded, very powerful processor for sensors and sound.

And I also

explored using an analog accelerometer.

The reason I really like analog accelerometers is, and this is not a plug for Bella, it's just something that I find really powerful in instrument design, so I want to tell you.

Analog accelerometers, you're kind of limited what you can do with them if you use kind of like Arduino, stuff like that.

However, if you have really high resolution analog sensing and a powerful enough computer, you can start doing really interesting filtering.

And that's where I think analog accelerometers get really, really powerful for gesture recognition, all kinds of stuff like that.

So try it out with the high performance sensing system of your choice.

But that, I think there's a lot more to accelerometers than the way they're usually applied.

And I also used a Trill Bar, which is a capacitive touch sensor, also made by Bella.

And the reason I used it was not because only because I had a bunch around the house.

I I guess that was part of it, but also it detects multi-touch and it also reports touch size.

And I was like, hmm, so that can tell you how hard you're gripping something.

Interesting.

So that was kind of what I did.

And so I made a digital mock-up that was really just messing around with the circle and going, well, what I guess would this kind of thing sort of look like.

And I did this at Exhane, which is a hack space in Berlin.

If you are in Berlin, please visit.

It's fabulous.

It's a really, really good place.

And I will tell you this interesting story.

Every time somebody came into the hack space over the last few weeks I've been working on this, they go, oh cool, what is that?

And I found that the younger they were,

I would say, do you watch much Star Trek?

And the younger they were, the more likely they were to say, I've never heard of that show.

So I take you live to how that made me feel.

And now you can feel that way too and join me in that.

And please, if you have children, please tell them about Star Trek.

Anyway, so what I did with this was I laser cut layers and layers of paper and

glued it together.

And now I will show you the prototype.

So

it's not an able to push.

How good a troll would that be?

It was just the best box that I had.

It's a great box.

So this is the instrument here.

Which looks something like the original.

Let me just turn it on.

Look at the it's it's pro really really prototype-y.

Look at that.

So much hot glue.

You're not going to believe it.

So while this boots up,

so this is just layers of,

I find paper to be a very versatile material for prototyping instruments because you can laser cut it very, very nicely.

Would you like me to hold it up?

Yes.

I'm afraid it's going to fall apart.

So is this high enough?

All right.

So what I do with this very common technique is using layers and layers of paper and then sandwiching them together.

You can get nice curves.

You can sort of get a prototypey feel for it.

It's also really cheap, so if you mess it up, it's not a tragedy.

And on the side, these just acrylic panels that I covered with little bits of tissue paper to kind of mimic that, the colored sections.

So, oh, it's on now.

So

let me get my business in order.

Okay.

So what it does, what I really prototyped was the, I started off, I have it, like I think there's a lot more to do on this instrument but at this point I was thinking well what does it mean to grip something what does like even your hands on an instrument mean and so I kind of did this thing where

it would make a sound for each finger that you put on it and if you laid them on very gently

it sounds lovely

Hello, Hyperfix crew.

It's your good friend Astrid here.

I just wanted to give you a little bit of an update about where the font is at.

The response has been really, really amazing since your episode came out.

A lot of people have reached out, a lot of type designers talking about this font.

Some people have made their own versions over the years.

And it's been great to just dork out with other people about how great this font is.

Also, Klaus Schmeidinger, who's the original developer of Eagle, reached out to me to talk about it.

And I've continued to see this font everywhere.

I recently took a DJ rig apart for parts, and inside the circuit boards were printed with this font.

They were obviously made in Eagle, except they had to use capital O's instead of the zeros.

Yeah, I noticed.

And I also, my partner was watching an episode of Max Headroom from 1987 just this evening, and the final credits.

Guess what font they were in?

litt.chr.

So this little font has has apparently been everywhere and it's really been an amazing thing to be able to give it a name and to be able to put it somewhere where people can see it.

And I released it on GitHub for free and where people can download it and use it themselves.

And last week one of the developers from Google Fonts got hold of me through GitHub and asked if I would be willing to let Google release it within the Google Fonts catalog, which is amazing.

And so that will be hopefully coming soon to Google Fonts.

I've got to complete the character set first, which is enormous, but I'm getting there.

So thank you so much for helping me to breathe new life into this little forgotten font.

Thanks.

Special thanks this week to the folks at the Audio Developers Conference.

And if you want to share Astra's talk with someone else or check out other videos from ADC, there's a link to the video in the show notes.

Check them out at audio.dev.

Hyperfixed is produced by Amori Yates, Emma Cortland, Sari Safer Zukanek, and Tony Williams.

It was engineered by Tony Williams.

Music in this episode was by me.

I figured since this was a Star Trek-themed episode, I'd give you a piece of fun Star Trek-themed trivia for the end of the episode because the theme song's too damn long.

If you watch Star Trek the Next Generation, Commander Riker, played by Jonathan Frakes, nine times out of of ten, when he goes to sit down in a chair, rather than pulling the chair out and sitting down, he will swing his leg over top of the back of the chair and then sit down on it.

It's one of the weirdest things I've ever seen, and I've never seen anybody else do it except him in that show.

I'll put a link to a video of it in the show notes.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next week.

Radiotopia

from PRX