If you like to create your own samples and you're tired about the old and traditional way to sample instruments and noises -- or maybe if you're a doctor -- the Stethosphone will be your new selfmade gear you'll always bring with you. This simple instrument will allow you to make surface recordings and will give you the possibility to sample guitar, drums and other traditional instruments, but also computers and any other kind of vibrating surface.

But first: who is Luca Capozzi?

Luca Capozzi is a sound designer and electronic musician, owner of Progsounds community and lucacapozzi.com. He also collaborated with a couple of Italian audio magazines as author and media content creator, made original music compositions and interactive audio designs for theatre shows, and teaches synthesis for an electronic music course. Let's read now about the Stethosphone in his own words:

Hi Luca, What exactly is the Stethosphone and how do you created it?

Hi Lorenzo. The Stethosphone, as you can see, is a simple yet effective toy to make "different" kind recordings straight from object bodies. It is cheap, easy to build and very fun to use.

How you will use and what will be the applications of the Stethosphone?

Before going technical, let me introduce you the concept behind this instrument and source of my recent research and future works which I named "Straniamento Acustico". Usually we (as musicians) are used to working with a lot of samples, synthesizers, effects, and so on. All we can hear and furthermore mangle is based on our perception of sound. The concept of "Straniamento Acustico" is to hear a sound from an strager's (or object's [Ed. Note: not "objective"]) point of view, totally (or almost) unrelated to the sound source we're recording. Did you ever asked yourself how, for example, your desk will "hear" a cello? A sound as perceived by another body can be very different from what we can usually hear and can be a good starting point to create more new and unusual sounds. I will explain this better in the manifesto I'm writing about it.
Anyway, now you may ask why I choose to do something like the Stethosphone instead of using more conventional piezo transducers. Honestly I'm using piezos too for some of my works, but I found it more interesting to experiment with something that can give me both surface capture and a body that already affects the sound i'm recording. The rubber pipe of a stethoscope is perfect in order to capture sounds focusing on low frequency range. All sounds you can capture with it are food for effect chains to create new great soundscapes. Try listening to city noises through a wall and, then, feed a wet reverb with frequency shifted copy of the captured sound. . . "pret-a-porter" ambient textures.

I'm a newbie with soldering and similar stuff, will I be able to create my own Stethosphone?

Sure you can. In order to build a Stethosphone you only need a cheap medical stethoscope (I paid mine less then 10 Euros), a couple of mic capsules and a stereo cable. For my model, I used a couple of Panasonic WM-61A capsules since they are cheap (20 Euros for a dozen), easy to find, very linear in frequency response and plug-in powered. A perfect match for my Sony PCM-D50 digital recorder. I stole the stereo cable from an old pair of cheap headphones, removing the speakers and solder the cables to the capsules. I don't needed any extra solder since those capsules only need to be touched by a tip of the iron. Now you can insert both capsules into the stethoscope pipe, then apply some duct tape and you're ready to go. You can check the complete project (with some audio demo) on my Behance portfolio.

I hope you, and Gearwire readers, will find this fun and useful. Have a nice time.