The Wing Pinger by Meng Qi is an analog synthesizer whose central element is two resonant lowpass filters. Each of the two filters is driven by a variable-speed needle pulse, which triggers the so-called filter pinging. A special Q-compensation compensates the pinging behavior in different pitches again. Musically in the most serviceable sense, the instrument operates in the range of what a lowpass filter does best: being "played" with the cutoff control immediately before self-oscillation. These sounds tend to be more bell-like and mellow. Outside this range, pulsating sound constructs, noisy, screaming multi-resonant sounds, and very subliminal tones are all possible. The audible results of the Meng Qi Wing Pinger are basically kept very organic; experimental sound research weighs higher here than the reproducibility of known sound palettes.
Except for Volume, all parameters in the Wing Pinger work with feedback and cross modulation, so it is hardly possible to operate one knob without affecting another. The two touch keyboards and the step modulators form a symbiosis of pitch control for the filters and triggering or varying the needle impulses. Thanks to the two audio inputs, external signals can also be processed, the results are similarly whacky as the purely internally generated sounds. Cutoff and resonance (Q) are each separately addressable via CV e.g. from a modular system or an external control voltage controller. The generated triggers at the step outputs are scaled mixtures of shift registers.