THE LIGHT4SOUND STORY

The story of Light4Sound got its start, as most ideas do, in the elevator. Dr. Waleed “Lee” Haddad was thinking about music and sound, and in particular the motion of strings on stringed instruments, and how a vibrating string actually creates a sound wave.

Strings don’t vibrate in just one dimension—they actually have very complex movements, with vertical, horizontal, rotational and longitude components. The vibrations develop and change over time, and how they create sound is not as obvious as it may seem at first blush.

As he started to think about how to measure these waves, Lee drew on decades of experience in developing optical sensor technologies, including his time at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and a number of startups. An optical solution would offer very fast response—much faster than the string vibrations themselves develop. And the device itself could be compact, cheap, and focused on a small area—just single section of the strings. And, the sensitivity, and response to the vibrations could also be tailored using the optics as well.

With all this in mind, Lee started with a very simple test apparatus in his lab, and began experiments on his optical bench, learning from, and improving the apparatus steadily. He realized that this could have very interesting possibilities as an instrument pickup, especially since it could allow the use of different string materials, eliminating magnetic drag, and improving the frequency response over traditional pickups.

It was clear that this could have very interesting implications for string materials, magnetic drag, and response. But as a practicing musician, the keyboard player in a band, currently Radiograph, Lee immediately realized that to be truly successful, the pickup not only had to sound good—it had to be a drop-in replacement, so that guitar (and bass) players could continue to use their favorite instruments.

Tor Lundgren and Lee Haddad set up Light4Sound to bring the product to commercial fruition, and began extended iterative process of development, designing and building various prototype units. It all took a bit longer than we would have liked, but Light4Sound is now on the cusp of delivering an optical pickup, the ōPik, that truly realizes the potential of this technology. We are really looking forward to putting the oPik in the hands of musicians around the world, so we can all make music with light.