Jorrit Dijkstra

Jorrit Dijkstra: "I found my Lyricon I in 1999 in a junk store, and asked the inventor Bill Bernardi to repair it. He made a little time free and told me passionately the story of the invention and production. 'I spent 5 years developing the instrument, I made 4 or 5 prototypes. I studied the acoustics of wind instruments, and made a sythesizer that works with additive synthesis to imitate the overtones. The transducer contains a membrane and a photo cell, which translate breath and attack into voltages. After the first Lyricon we got requests from players to simplify the synthesizer and add an extra oscillator, so they could play parallel intervals. So we developed the Lyricon II and the Wind Driver. The synthesizer in the Lyricon II is totally different and the Wind Driver has to be hooked up to an extern analog synthesizer. They were mass produced by Selmer. Of The Lyricon II 5000 pieces were produced. The Lyricon I was hand made, only about 300 of them were made. My favourite is still the Lyricon I, cause it has more control features and a better synthesiser.'"