This instrument turns the hum of your electronics into music
Popular Science...
The jet-engine whine of a hairdryer is a sound most people run from. But listen to the right frequencies, Alexandra Fierra says, and something else surfaces: motion, rhythms that shift and repeat, musical textures that undulate like waves in the ocean. “There is a movement of energy in there that if you could hear it, it actually can be very elegant,” she says.
Most of us never hear it, because the sound is not really sound at all. It’s the electromagnetic field the motor emits, invisible and restless, radiating from nearly everything electric in your home—what we would normally encounter as interference. Fierra built an instrument to interpret it.
Eternal Research Demon Box
That instrument is the Demon Box, a $999 desktop device from Fierra’s Brooklyn-born, now LA-based company, Eternal Research, that launched this year after a Kickstarter campaign raised more than $111,000. It picks up the electromagnetic fields radiating from everyday electronics and turns them into sound, along with the control signals that can drive synthesizers, modular gear, and stage lights.
The name and the marketing of the Demon Box lean into the occult—“part science and séance”—but Fierra’s actual pitch is closer to the opposite of mysticism. The magic, she argues, is that all of this is genuinely there, and you can learn to hear it.
The idea of listening to EMF is older than the Demon Box. Since the late 1970s, the German artist Christina Kubisch has used induction coils to convert the fields around us into sound, and her ongoing Electrical Walks series hands participants headphones that make a city’s invisible electrical activity audible. Since then, affordable portable devices such as the open-source Elektrosluch have helped bring electromagnetic listening to a wider audience. Fierra views the Demon Box as the next evolution of that idea, moving beyond simple field monitoring to become a spatialized listening device and an expressive instrument in its own right.
Deconstructing guitars years ago, Fierra built her own high-powered version of the same idea and then kept going. When people told her someone had already done it, she took that as a prompt. “What does 30 steps beyond that look like?” she remembers thinking. “One of the Achilles’ heels of capitalism is that sometimes when you get a product that sells, you stop innovating.”
Here is the plain version of how the Demon Box works: Inside its triangular enclosure sit 33 small inductors, arranged across three channels, that act like antennas for the electromagnetic fields around them. Bring a magnetic object near them, and the box senses the field; the signal can come out as audio, as control voltage for a modular synthesizer, or as MIDI to trigger other instruments and visuals. The move that makes it an instrument rather than a meter is phase.
“If you bring multiples of these together and everything is out of phase, you create this third thing,” Fierra says. That thing is new rhythms and shifting amplitudes born from the interference between pickups.
A guitar pickup, in comparison, aims to capture one string cleanly and treats everything else as a problem. “We didn’t invent any of the parts,” she says. “We just arranged them in a way that was purposefully completely unique.”
The fun lies in what you point the Demon Box at. The obvious targets have motors: power drills, electric toothbrushes, anything that whirs. Then Fierra realized she didn’t need power at all. A permanent magnet has a field the box can read, and so does the voil coil in a Bluetooth speaker or the inductor coil buried in a cellphone, which sings as you move it past the sensors. Two magnets together make a third pattern as their fields collide.
Every magnet has a different shape and therefore a different voice, and Fierra likes to hold a sheet of magnetic field viewing film over them to see the fields directly. Her instinct is a kind of inversion, less about transforming the noise than, as she puts it, “becoming a better listener to the details.”
Hold a fluorescent light over the box, she says, run it through effects, and “it becomes this huge, beautiful drone.” A violin is hard, she notes, because everyone wants to play it like a violin. Nobody expects anything of a hairdryer, and that is exactly the freedom.
Fierra came to all of this sideways. She grew up in a Pennsylvania Dutch community where, she says, “if you couldn’t do it yourself, you couldn’t do it.” And she describes herself as a former Luddite, dismissive of technology that struck her as “adversely inhuman.” She wrote on a typewriter and refused to buy an iPhone, until she reframed the whole category. “A synthesizer is just like a new type of hammer or a new type of saw,” she says.
Fierra started piano at 30, and at 42 she treats that late start as a license rather than a limit: She came up outside the traditional music world, with no inherited sense of how things are supposed to be arranged.
Invention runs in Fierra’s family, and it hides in plain sight. Her great-grandfather, J.I. Rodale, started an electrical-connector company with his brother in 1923, then used the proceeds to build the publishing house behind magazines like Organic Gardening and Prevention. His daughter Ruth married Joel Spira, who invented the first solid-state dimmer and built it into Lutron, the Pennsylvania lighting company Rodale himself helped seed by giving the couple space to set up shop.
The dimmer is the object Fierra keeps returning to, precisely because you forget it is there. “That’s how good design is to me,” she says. “It’s just there.” It is a fair description of what she wants from the Demon Box, too: quiet, nuanced work on a signal most people never think about.
Fierra Ex Machina performs at Rite of the Demon: Summer in San Francisco—Eternal Research’s synesthetic retelling of the Oracle of Delphi through live-scored music, dance, and film—joined by electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani.
That instinct, rearranging familiar parts rather than inventing new ones, is why Fierra reaches past electronics to the orchestra for her real lineage. She points to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which pushed the violin out of front and center, spreading the coloristic spotlight across the orchestra.
“The Demon Box is in a way a legacy of The Rite of Spring,” Fierra says. “It just changed the orientation of things.” Even the odd count of 33 inductors, arrived at around the 17th prototype, follows a rule she repeats like a mantra: “There’s an ounce of the arbitrary in any worthy endeavor.”
So what about the demon? Fierra is content to let people enjoy the occult flavor, but says that is not her true meaning. Hers is the older sense of the word: the daemon, a muse and a guide rather than anything to do with good and evil. It is, she says, “the source of inspiration demon that comes to you in a dream and says, I’ll go further, there’s more out there.”
That is the whole project, really. Stand in a forest, Fierra says, and it is all alive, all energy and principle and motion, and that is already astonishing without anything supernatural added. “Even reality is magic.”
The Demon Box just hands you a way to hear a little more of it. Which means that the next time your hairdryer whines, the fluorescent light buzzes, or your phone hums against the table, there is a real case to be made that your ordinary, irritating, electrified world has been singing all along. You only had to listen.
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