Meng Qi takes you on a journey through a melodic and chaotic sound adventure with his new Wing Pinger synthesizer that works without oscillators
Back at Superbooth 2019, the Chinese sound artist and developer Meng Qi introduced the Wing Pinger. This is a Synthesizer that has no oscillators but instead uses a pair of self-resonating filters & feedback to generate sounds. At S20HE, he has shown the final version and announced that the Wing Pinger is going into production.
A lot has changed optically. From the silver prototype design into a lovely black/gold finish built in a wooden case. Also new is a touch keyboard on the right, which is somewhat reminiscent of Buchla synthesizers. With this, you can play the filter very tonally.
Wing Pinger, A Synthesizer For Tonal & Atonal Sounds
Meng Qi describes Wing Pinger as the link to organic analog texture, rhythm, noise, and melodies. It allows you to travel between chaotic and tonal passages as fast as your motions shift. It is based on a pair of 4-pole resonate lowpass filters surrounded by a network of comparators, pulse converters, binary counters, and shift registers.
Wing Pinger exploits the idea of filter pinging (the operation of using narrow pulses as filter input). With Q near self-oscillation it makes naturally decaying tones of various lengths, assembling sounds from percussions to plucking. A special Q compensation is implemented, to balance pinging behaviors at different pitches. Thanks, to the multiple feedback and cross-modulation paths, Wing Pinger can operate according to the principles of chaos theories. These features give you the possibility to discover sounds that goes way beyond classic filtering.
Tonal Patterning
Not only pure chaos and noise are possible, but also tonal beautiful patterns that sound like raindrops. WP is capable of generating pentatonic patterns from its carefully weighted step modulation. With practice, you can play noise or melody at will. The device can also be used as a stereo analog filter bank. Process stereo or dual mono signals through the filters, add spice to the tone, generate movements with special WP modulations.
First Look
I had the opportunity to talk to Meng Qi during the Superbooth 20 Home Edition and I received a look at the device including a big sound demo.
Meng Qi Wing Pinger will be available in Summer. Price TBA
More information here: MQ
Would have been more informative without the outboard FX. If your gonna demo a product, demo /just/ the product.