The lowest level of the sculpture has all the “boring” digital stuff — an ESP32, the LED drivers, and the digital-to-analog converters.

The synth’s eight channels use up most of the ESP32’s I/O and provide a sound that’s reminiscent of the eight-bit video game era.

An undocumented set of low-level commands has been discovered in the ESP32 microchip, a widely used component in IoT devices. Manufactured by the Chinese company Espressif, the ...