Biography

Martijn Zwartjes was born on October 7, 1965 in Hengelo, The Netherlands. From a very young age he was fascinated by piano and electric and church organs. He spent many days playing them whenever he had the chance.

At six, he received his first soldering iron from his grandpa and spent much of his time turning radios into oscillators. His bedroom was often filled with endless tape loops running through multiple tape recorders all over the place.

At 10, he visited an open exhibition of Crackle boxes in a gallery near his home town, where people could experiment playing with them and making sound. During this period, he never showed up for school.

Later, he was introduced to the 7400 series TTL IC's and did a lot of bread boarding all sorts of stuff. He was also introduced to the Commodore 64 where he created a lot of sound generating programs exploring the SID chip.

Martijn studied Music Technology at the HKU in Utrecht, the Netherlands and was very inspired by the synthesis classes he took with Ernst Bonis. Bonis arranged a gig for him at the Haags Gemeente Museum where he had access to their collection of vintage modular synthesizers which he could use for experimentation. He then moved onto doing sound design for films, and C programming for several companies.

He has created self-generating music machines in Max and developed time stretching algorithms for Apple Computer. He has also created algorithms for sample rate conversion, noise reduction, vocoding, etc

After spending some time working on farm in Norway milking cows, driving a tractor, and brewing hundreds of gallons of beer, he got his hands on SynC Modular and Reaktor and continued his work designing sound and building instruments.

Since then, he has done a lot of freelancing for Native Instruments, where he ended up working for several years. His algorithms and instruments can be found in almost every NI Product. He has also developed several VST effects together with Leo Degen, which can be found at Sonic Flavours.