A work co-designed with Ciiyte (Cai Yitong).
Overview
The Induction Mixer is a 12-input, 4-output spatial mixer, and a playable instrument.
It does not pass sound through cables: the 12 audio inputs each feed one of the 12 printed-circuit-board antennas inside the panel, which transmit them by near-field electromagnetic induction; you hold an electromagnetic pickup made from a ferrite-rod inductor above the panel, and the pickup and preamplifier turn the field back into sound. So the panel holds 12 invisible sound sources at once, each fixed in its own position. Where you move your hand is what you hear; move away and that source fades.
The panel carries 12 input level knobs, 12 input jacks and output control. It has 12 inputs but only 4 outputs — what you hear is the result of the four pickup channels moving between those 12 sources.
Motivation
Usually mixing is a stage that comes after composition: the music is written first, and then the mix is made to sound good. On this instrument there is nothing but mixing. The 12 sources are given, and the only things you can change are where you listen and how much you hear. what if mixing itself were composition? The question comes from Christina Kubisch's The Mixer Project. What I wanted was to make it into an instrument you can play.
The first time I played it I spent a very long time simply finding where the antennas were, and several tracks I could not find at all. My first reaction was that the instrument was not behaving the way I had designed it to.
When I play it I do not often lift the electromagnetic pickup. To stop it sliding across the panel on its own we tried several things and settled on an electromagnetic pickup housing 3D-printed in stainless steel; to keep it silent as it slides I lined the top of the case with velvet, so sliding it became second nature. When you are hunting for a source with one electromagnetic pickup you usually have to take the others away first, or it is hard to tell what you are doing; and the ones you take away often cannot be put back where they were, and the information in those channels is lost in the meantime.
The instrument therefore has two states. When one person plays it, there is a single electromagnetic pickup in the hand, and wherever the hand moves is what you hear. An installed state is something I have imagined: hand the panel to an audience, with no technical threshold at all, so that anyone can reach in and decipher and rebuild this electromagnetic field together, and a listener is no longer only a listener. But I have not yet shown it in a gallery.
Where it comes from
Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks was the first thing that showed me this. She sends visitors out into the city wearing sensitive wireless headphones that make the electromagnetic fields around us audible. In her own words: "Lighting systems, wireless communications, radar, anti-theft security devices, surveillance cameras, cellphones, computers, antennae, navigation systems, ATMs, Wi-Fi routers, neon signs, public transportation networks, etc, all generate electrical fields — hidden as if under cloaks of invisibility, but with incredible presence." The Mixer Project goes further: "Every participant rediscovers the sound world of his own city in a new way. He becomes a composer of an individual piece which he/she even can take home."
Cathy Van Eck's Between Air and Electricity: Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments surveys how microphones and loudspeakers have been used as instruments. That book is where I began to understand an instrument as a bridge between the performer's bodily action, their inner hearing, and the sound that comes out; that is the starting point for this piece.
How it works
Signal is cascaded down from one channel's normally-closed contact to the next (1→2→3→4 and so on). When you plug external audio into any channel, the cascade arriving from the channel above is physically broken. So if you only patch into In 1, 4, 7 and 10, the instrument reorganises itself into four independent zones.
During development I bought a batch of different antennas and inductors and tested them one by one, at different distances and orientations, for how they worked as electromagnetic speakers and pickups, before settling on the combination in use now. The work was mostly in testing, not in calculating.
The whole signal path is analogue — from the inputs, the antennas and the near-field layer, through the four inductive sensors to the preamplifier, with no digital stage anywhere in between. Signal capture is physically zero-latency.
The preamplifier is based on an existing design by Ciiyte (Cai Yitong); the case was also designed by Ciiyte and fabricated by JLCPCB.
My contribution
Concept and overall design
Electromagnetic pickup design (the four-channel body-inductance sensors)
Antenna design: bought a range of antennas and tested them one by one before choosing
Postlude
Once finished, this work was used as an instrument to make riverrun.
But as an instrument, its own performing possibilities are still largely unexplored: I have only used it in this one piece so far.
Where it has been shown
2026.07.01, final presentation for the Department of Music Engineering, Shanghai Conservatory of Music (second semester, 2025–2026).