Squeezing the volume antenna for ripeness

OK so I was fooling around, just can't get to sleep without a little Theremin! And, I have clear heatshrink tape on my volume antenna because I'd noticed some chirps when I touched it..... so, it's got this sort of coating on it, right? Well, um, how do I put this? This is kind of cool. I noticed, that if I take my finger and thumb and give the pitch antenna a friendly squeeze, like testing fruit for ripeness, the theremin kind of gives a little yelp. It's hilarious! I'd put a vid of it on YouTube if I had a camera to do it.

What this is, is the same little yelp from touching the bare antenna, but with the covering, it needs a bit more contact because the coupling is capacitive. If I stand back a bit more, I don't get it, so it's not something to get in the way of playing - the effect could really be used to convince someone that a theremin has feelings though!

I'm really surprised at the behaviors I'm seeing in what are really low frequency, or "lowfer", circuits. These oscillators are working down below AM broadcast, down in beacon-land, where submarines communicate using super-slow Morse and nav beacons beep and boop plaintively.

I guess anything RF, at all, is magic!

That's such a cool effet ain't it? I got the same thing when I sleeved my antennae with nylon cable sleeve. If you do the squeezing gradually, you can evin make the theremin growl, and bark like a big mean dog in the lower pitches. Run it though some reverb.

If you do it just right it can produce a flute like sound too.

I was also going to shoot a youtube video right before my 12 volt power regulator in my theremin went down.

While I'm waiting for my standard to get back, I thaught I'd get an E Pro to play with in the mean time. It's cool. I have not tried sleeving the antennae on it, though something tells me the effect won't be there on the pro.