The MorphoResonator: A Chandelier You Can Play
Maker Faire Bay Area 2026
September 25th-27th
Walk up to a chandelier glowing in a dark room, humming with music — luminous forms hand-sculpted from cellophane and packing tape over light, proof that living light doesn't have to wait for a foundry. Make a sound — clap, hum, speak, play — and it answers you: the light shifts, and the music takes your sound in and plays it back changed. That's the MorphoResonator, a sculptural light instrument fused with a live generative music system. The music is a river built from my own recorded guitar playing — forty years of it — arranged into generative scenes that respond to what happens in the room. Throughout the day I'll step in with a guitar and improvise over it live; the rest of the time, visitors are the soloists. It's call and response with an object: the chandelier is the noun, call-and-response is the verb. This is iteration one, built inexpensively and on purpose — tape, cellophane, LEDs, and software (Ableton, Gig Performer) — the working proof of a system designed to scale into blown glass and steel.
David Gelfand
David Gelfand is a Berkeley-based musician and sculptor. He was playing guitar in Greenwich Village clubs before he was old enough to drive, and spent the '90s touring nationally with his rock band. His other lifetime runs on fire: molten glass pulled from the furnace flows like honey off the end of the blowpipe, and he's been gathering people around that light ever since — blowing glass from the Rockies to the Berkshires, building his own line of lighting in Oregon, melting recycled glass as an artist-in-residence in the Caribbean, and running a studio/gallery in New Orleans' Marigny. He's also a UL-certified lighting technician, so the fire is always wired right. The MorphoResonator is where the two lifetimes converge: sculptural light that answers sound.
