OSZILOT seeks to give forgotten and seemingly worthless found objects new meaning and significance. Suspended as pendulums and equipped with tiny sensors, these objects undergo a quasi-alchemical transformation, awakening to life through sound. They are transformed into animated, symbolic artifacts and given a soul that sonically expresses itself. As they swing at varying frequencies, they generate constantly shifting rhythms, soundscapes, and abstract musical structures.
The audiovisual pendulum ensemble represents a unique form of live electronic music performance, in which the act of sound generation is visualized in a physical way and becomes intuitively comprehensible. The idea that objects possess a spirit of their own serves as a guiding principle in our exploration of the relationship between humans, objects, and the environment.
We premiered our new installation and performance 'Beseelte Objekte' at the wonderful Sonic Matter Festival on February 28 2026. Below some excerpts. It's always fun when in the end of our concerts the audience does it's own, mostly quite noisy, performance (at the end of the video).
What interests us about pendulums?
The laws of pendulum physics were discovered in the 15th century by Galileo Galilei and are among the cornerstones of scientific description. From a musical perspective, what makes pendulums particularly interesting is their ability to swing in a steady rhythm, independent of the force applied. The tempo of this oscillation is determined solely by the length of the string from which the object hangs.
Using small motion sensors, we convert the pendulums’ movement into sound. Thus, the pendulum installation functions like a primitive, analog drum machine, whose rhythms we can change by adjusting the lengths of the strings. The imprecision of our various pendulums create constantly changing rhythmic patterns with a hypnotic quality. An archaic, physical world is connected with the possibilities of digital sound synthesis.
- email us for bookings, tech rider, questions etc.
How does it work?
We use up to 18 small sensors (accelorometers / gyroscops) which are simply stuck to our objects with sticky tack. The sensors send the movement data of the objects to our computer via bluetooth, where it is transformed to sound using Ableton and Max4Live. In collaboration with Max Kriegleder we are currently developing
new sensors to extend the functionality further.
