Portfolio
Forty years of instrument, system, and prototype designs — precision motion control, harsh-environment field instrumentation, and a shipping electronic musical instrument.
View portfolio →eCorder
The electronic alto recorder — a physical-modeling musical instrument designed, built, and sold by Cantux Research. Photos, audio demonstrations, and documentation.
www.ecorder.io →Michael Shonle
CTO and Founder
Michael Shonle has a broad and varied background and extensive experience in a wide variety of software and hardware engineering areas. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he specialized in signal processing and computer hardware and software, and has more recently studied Mathematical Modeling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Michael has worked in such diverse areas as 2-dimensional signal processing for a high-resolution film scanner company as well as on a cutting-edge HTML/XML Custom Web Development and Server System. His experience ranges from interfacing with high-performance highly integrated media processing chips and includes working with custom sound synthesizer ASICs at the legendary Kurzweil Music Systems Research and Development Institute.
In addition, Mr. Shonle is the brains behind the Paramount ME Robotic Telescope Mount, the system that has found more supernovae than anything else looking skyward.
That telescope work continues today: the MKS-6000, the latest generation of his precision motion controllers for the Paramount line, resolves telescope position to a twentieth of an arcsecond. Recent work also spans power, thermal, and failsafe electronics for unattended trackside rail-monitoring instruments that survive year-round outdoor extremes. And with the eCorder, Michael has taken an idea from a community fabrication shop to a shipping commercial product: an electronic alto recorder built on ZaeroDyne, his own physical-modeling synthesis engine, with femtofarad-scale capacitive touch sensing — designed, fabricated, and calibrated one instrument at a time at his bench in Cambridge, and now in its third production batch.