Just finished a big work: updating the sidrazzi organ to become the "sidrax" shown in the bottom of the picture.  Its syntax is similar to the "tetrax" which has 6 bananas for each bar:

• two orange outputs represent a voltage readout of the push and pull exerted on the bar.
• two green inputs are the glitchifiers for each oscillator
• one blue input is fm modulation for each oscillator
• one red output is the triangle wave output for each oscillator

In addition, there are gray inputs on the sidrax: one for each knob master pitch and master chaos.  The chaos response is updated to be more subtle, with many grains and whirlpools on the way to complete noise.  Each bar now has the long desired, simple slider pitch control rather than a button.  This allows a lot more control of the individual tones and also to set up situations where there is a composed arrangement of low and high tones.

Also pictured, in the middle, is the new "axe" which can be a combination of tet, sid, and on and on, to make one nice self contained organ, like in church!

Ordering

First in a series of papers talking about philosophical underpinnings of circuit making and tuning:
Importance of Unrecorded Music

 A microcottage is an entity, constructed for the purpose of cottage industry.
It will appropriate unused space, such as this unheated attic with asbestos floor tiles...  It has a skylight for day work, no water, so it must be brought up.
 The soldering and prototyping area consists of found lawn furniture and other student items, a fan, storage of components and circuit boards, and glue!
Micro cottage now has a cnc machine for rapid construction of quality wood items.  It is a Probotix, run by mach3 on XP.   The code is generated programmatically in Ruby.
 A programming area with various wood species scattered.
 Inside the dust room, you can see various stocks leaning against the wall.  Ciat Lonbarde uses the laminated hardwoods technique to achieve maximum stability and stripiness.
Bed for dog naps and consulting with health insurance professionals.

In celebration of the coming arrival of my good friend Ezra Buchla on campusius, I will present a mental map of integer computer operations.  They are the candy of DSP.  Ezra has built a sound computer using blackfin, which he says is fixed point, I think he said at 32.32...  A gigabyte of frac pernt!  Floating point is going obsolete because it causes too much heat.  Meanwhile fixed point, which is old, can also be new.  Aleph Sound Computer.  Shnth.  Roulette::Mixology Festival::NYC::February 8 and 8+1.  Ezra lectures in SuperCollider class on integers math in the Aleph.

The mental map is on the first floor of the BMA, Baltimore Museum of Art.  It occurs in my dreams but also when thinking about algorithms during the day.  It is like a transparent overlay over the math.  It takes the form of a gift shop, lit well with fluorescent lights, but it is not the gift shop of the BMA, which sells postcards and cutesy Baltimore paraphernalia.  Instead, it is more like the giftshop of a science museum: crystal growing kits, bug boxes, maybe some sea monkeys.  One other point about the giftshop mental map: it is not in the actual floor location of the BMA giftshop, but rather it occupies the area where African and Native American artefacts can be seen; their faded leather geometries and totemic forms transmute into hypercolor plastic toys for science boys and tomboys. 

This mental map can be seen when figuring basic integer dsp algorithms mentally, such as random number generators, bit shift operations, arithmetic and logic, fixed point multiplication, which provides for intergrators and thus resonators, mechanical triangle wave oscillators, and my favorite derivative of that: the nume deno oscillator.

Barney is on the radio.  He has taken up residence at the station, padding softly on the root-encrusted paths between the transmitter shack and the zither shed.  He wears his monk's robes on the compound, situated in a pine grove between two soybean fields, farmed by men with corn cob pipes- upright men that are never seen but for their work, which is crafting furrows in the wavy land.  The wind at night in the pines, when it is radio-phonic, is often the situation around which the monk builds a show.

He plays the zither, his zither, made from the Pawlonia which grows to the east, in the Broken Lands.  The monk's zither is of a special, "eclectic" form, made from multiple puzzle pieces of the Pawlonia, which had been struck by lightning, which was a toasty brown.  The wood, having been struck by lightning, was prepared and dressed by the train tracks where it fell by a man with a special "safety orange Carhartt"  and a Sears chainsaw.

On certain spring nights at the station, Barney could be coaxed to play a special rendition of "Sears chainsaw" on the radio zither, involving many special effects and loud buzzing drones.  However, it was rare for him to perform a war-like piece on the zither; as is dictated by good taste, compositions regarding the serenity of nature should prevail by almost ten-to-one in a program.  Since I have good taste myself, I especially enjoy the monk's rendition of such pieces as "Red Lights Flashing in the Pines at Night" and "Subterranean Waters: a Hole in the Forest Floor".

It is the monk's dog-companion, or the dog which companions the monk, who enjoys musical portraits of chases, which when played on the high string of his zither, remind him synaesthetically of the squirrel hunt: the smell of a sweaty dun, fattened by acorns and spring bulbs, in his mouth.  A violent shake to break the squirrels neck; the dog feels like a Tyrannosaurus.

The monk's dog is without features; he has a definite lean shape but the way his shag hair falls, no one can look him in the eyes and he likes it that way. 

In the next installment of "Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence,"
What is contained in the broken lands and warehouses of New Jersico?  What goes on in the mind of a monk's dog, accustomed as he is to the ultrasonic whine of radio equipment and the lonely pine trees at night? What is the meaning of the red light beacon in the pine trees?

for Roulette Mixology Festival, February 8, 2014.

"Driving at night with my son in the car-seat, I perceived an amber light floating over the corn-fields.  We frequently see such things out here in the fields, and I wanted to show these quantic phenomena to my son, but he was asleep.  On the radio, Barney's transmission from the secluded residence."

The Court Ensemble
What a nice day, thought the monk's dog.  He had made his rounds, visiting every pine in the grove in a way he had developed, a way wherein every pine was visited in a different way every visit.  You see, the monk's dog, in his  companionship with the monk, had learned some of the arts of CHAOS MAGIC, but adopted to a dogs way of being, so he knew the importance of not creating a locked habit, as dogs in the suburbs do.  There, in the dusky outskirts of the city, dogs trode paths in their yards between playsets and grills, and always pooped in the same place.

---

There in the pine grove, the monk's dog delighted in the subtle differences between pine roots- the scent of their rosin, their mottled curly forms in needly shade.  It was silent: the dog noticed this.  His master was standing in the courtyard, his hair braided, with an attentive look on his face.  The dog wondered what he was looking for.  The dog ran to the monk.  They walked in the paths.  All the buildings were clear of debris, and smelled like fresh clay or wood since the monk had swept there...

There are men in the courtyard.  The dog barked as the men were jumping and twirling in the air, their hemp clothing snapping which made the dog think of snapping bones.  Quantus Barney was back in the courtyard, talking with the men.  He asked them to pull their car, a silver sport utility vehicle, up to the edge of the courtyard dais, and then the men unloaded poles, beams, gongs, and casks of silk-wrapped wooden bodies: the lutes of this particular "ji" sect, visiting musicians at secluded radio transmitter.

The court ensemble was composed of one rack of stone chimes, held and struck by Chin Wong Feng, a finely clear set of brass bowles, managed by Bing Zi, two lutes strung with silk, held by Xiao and Lao, and a leather drum played by Cold Lake, who also had an eagle.  A set of bone trumpets complimented tin whistles played by elves.  Also there was a nylon mouth organ played serenely by Sereno.

The monk had a big job ahead of him: to accurately and/or artfully transduce the sounds within and without these bodies.  He brought out lead and ceramic "piezo" materials to capture the crystalline resonances of the stone chimes.  Soldering and affixing the sensors with pine resin took him through dinner.  He chained them all into a cheste in the shrine at the dais, which served as preamp for the gentle ceramic mana.  This he thus took to the house of the transmitter, draping the rubbered copper between roots so as not to be tread upon by the court ensemble.

The dog liked to pee on this rubber cord, in the darkness of the night.  Looking up through the blown smoke of the ceremonial fire, he saw the rotating red light of the antenna tower, hovering above the pines.  The dog knew it was to be a powerful transmission for the monk was working very hard.

In the next installment of "Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence,"
What happens when the most proud and austere court ensemble encounters the debauchery of Barney's city friend, Monkletto?  How well does this system of transducers and preamps pay off for a radio-phonic transmission?

Morals Excursion

A Piece by Jason Brogan 

Listening to this piece by a wonderful thinker, I ponder the nature of the sounds generated by blogging or emailing or spreadsheeting.  These processes do not share an essential sampling rate with more traditional computer musics.  That is, where Supercollider can run at 44.1khz, establishing predictable pitch references, non-sound programs do not have such a predictable interrupt routine; they are optimized to fit code into speed, thus they often sound like various hairiest kinds of noise.

Can the cork be used in such a way, as an interruptless computer that simulates such "sound of code" by just running blocks in real time, without a sampling rate?  Perhaps jumping around inside a uniform program memory by external stimulus, such as ADC codes.  The SRAM too can be treated as a material, wherein fixed function is abolished and code blocks use arbitrary offsets in memory.  A computer for computing's sake:


The metricized space to the left is SRAM, or memory for variables such as what is necessary to create a triangle oscillator or a resonator.  To the right, such code blocks as mentioned, a fourses, or my recent favorite invention, the mechanical triangle resonator, all of which feed PWM peripherals to create an analog output on pins.  Also, sub blocks, little email emulations, and the idea of an ADC which feeds program counter to jump around in this space of code.  

Morals Excursion Too

Is music for night or daylight?  That is the question raised by solar panels and batteries; to charge in the day and save it for boring old night, or run your instrument right now after lunch, in the midday lull, perhaps to entertain a siesta?  Does computer music sound good with the crickets and mysterious skunk sounds of night, or over the silence of a hot day with mojitoes?   We think about this all the time, because batteries are a chemical encased in the wood of the instrument.  With the Shnth, batteries, charged over USB, were a vehicle to entertain oneself whilst respectively vehicled, on the train or plane.

 Appropriating Steve

As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, ST is one of the biggest of the Chinese silicon houses; it is a "leader" in the Magic Quadrant model.  For that reason, of mainstream execution and stability, it was chosen for Shbobo's base material.  Contenders were Atmel and Microchip, which had had a long 8bit history, whereas ST started fresh with the 32bit Cortex and expanded to an 8bit backend.  Thus they had the benefit of all latecomers- building on the mistakes of others and profiting from their innovations.  Such as diversity of peripherals: timers, ADC, DAC, and most important, USB.   However, there were other reasons to appropriate ST, including the angle of its logo-font:


As is clearly seen, ST has appropriated a little bit of Roddenberry; its logo suggests space-age, advanced morals, and nineties special effects sequences.  Also, ST stands for Steve.  Continuing the playful interpretation sequence of our prey's logos, let's look at how they choose to represent their product in brochures:


The chosen logo for ST's 8bit branch is a kite: plaything of children and hobbyists delight.  The geometry of kite suggests simplicity, quadrilateral organization as one would expect in an 8bit architecture.  A speeding racecar, perhaps an application of the chip, contrasts awkwardly; is this chip about green wind power or petroleum?  The world in an 8bit chip, and the low power, CF lightbulb predict a new mini market for these.  Note the jumping man.


In contrast with the simple kite, ST chooses a butterfly to represent the more robust Cortex.  Clearly, it is not a plaything, but almost a living thing, like an elegant artificial intelligence.  The jumping man is back, with his exuberant sillohette of joy, and we appropriate this to mean music, and hopefully, dance music!  Instead of more concrete, green symbols, there is a cube in the top left corner, which is to mean this is one's cube, controller of cork: mister master cort.  Perhaps, one final note would be to look at the Chinese characters for the chosen symbols:
蝴蝶, HuDie, a butterfly: quite complex characters that share the insect radical.  In ideograms, you can see the relationship in complexity between the 8bit and 32bit architectures.

Recap: is it righteous or just plain preposterous to work on an 8bit chip?  Does that fulfill one facet of the ideas of "post-digital" or "post-laptop"?

A Seminar at UCSB

Deconstructing the Triangle Wave

Abstract

The speaker's analog circuits explore novel uses of simple components to yield chaotic and rich electronic timbres. Using examples such as "deconstructing the triangle wave," he will explain porting these concepts to a new, digital synthesizer, the Shnth. Ensuing topics include carving a squishable case, and classic computer music in embedded systems.

Biography

Peter Blasser, designer and builder of synthesizers at ciat-lonbarde.net, practices deep consultation with clients who seek rich interactions with their electronics. The instruments manifest electronic modulations through nodes, case flexure, and radio fields. He teaches circuit design and instrument building in classes and workshops, culminating in performance or installation. Some paper circuits can be downloaded from his website, printed out, and assembled to yield sound objects. The cybernetic interface uses the subtleties of touch, through discrete components, often "woven" together geometrically, to simulate intuitive patterns and chaotic sophistication. His designs are spurred into existence to explore platonic or philosophical concepts, which then acquire a narrative as they are refined into essential analog synthesizers.

Analog Synthesis of Triangle Waves

saw variations and clean triangle

modulating bounce and bounds

bounce is the slope or speed, bounds changes the height or depth

bounce and bounds modulation discloses chaos

Triangle Wave Assemblage

fourses mentality: bouncing off of each other's contingent bounds

schematic of sidrax organ

Tricentric Logics for Analog Synths

resonant excitation, or spiral if viewed in polar imaginary

If we take this point about round versus sharp, we have almost finished porting tricentric logics to analog synths.  You see, the round is the circle symbol, which literally happens if you run a resonant filter at saturation; a sine wave is one axis of a circle.  The other, angular part, all our triangle and saw waves, is the triangle symbol.  The only symbol left is the square, but we know that square waves are important in synths too; they are the pseudo-digital logics provided by 4000 series chips, as well as all the multi-stable, primitive transistor circuits. 

All this symbolization is fine and dandy, but where does it get us?  One benefit of porting diagrams, is to think and ask questions such as, if a circle resonator has an "input", as a filter, what would it mean if a triangle had an input?  Can we make a triangle wave behave like a spiral?  This question became of interest when designing a game, Mikey Walker, which we shall get to.  Basically, I needed more ways for the enemies to act when punched.  They were all resonating, and I wanted some to resonate in a triangular way.  Thus the "zwave" came about.  It is like a resonance in that it has an input, but it dissipates this energy by wavering with sharp rather than rounded peaks, and because this is a sort of bounds modulation, you can see that it gets faster as the wave dies out:

zwave has input, gets faster due to bounds shrinkage

curves generated by organic sensor such as piezo, and triangular facsimile

those same curves in arab mode, with no negative numbers

Interlude: Shnth Description

The Shnth, by Shbobo, is a computer music device that features the ARM Cortex M3 32 bit processor. It connects to host computer via USB, wherein the host computer (windows, linux, or macintosh) may read its "squish data" and create graphics and sound. Or, the Shnth itself is a standalone synthesizer, which may be programmed by host in the new language, "Shlisp", by Shbobo. It is potentially self powered, by batteries, which are charged, again, via USB. A switch turns it on, and 16 bit sound comes out a standard stereo 3.5mm jack. Like a laptop; it is "handtop". Four bars on top feel your fingers and two woven antennae below sense flesh, complimented by a battery of buttons. There are red lights.

Analog Emulation

The process of porting diagrams becomes very interesting and you can learn a lot when emulating analogs.  What does this mean?  Well, basically I mean to refer to writing digital code that tries to act the same way as an analog synth.  But there is also the poetry of the meaning of these two words: analog used to refer to that synthesizers were modeling physical processes such as cannonballs, missiles, and other war departments; emulation refers more to a sort of imitation, even mockery.  Let's not let our digital code make a mockery of analog!  One example I can bring forth, is that triangle wave oscillators are usually constructed in computer music, with phase accumulators and wave tables.  This makes a decent simulacrum of the mechanism, and it is preferred because you can thus control the spectral content with band-limiting.  But it is still a simulacrum.  Why not actually build the oscillators like sampled bouncy balls, and thus maintain control of bounce and bounds?  Thus, all the oscillators in the shnth actually have a variable for the ball, which is incremented or decremented, decided by a boolean, that represents the hysteresis loop.  Thus there can be "horse oscillators" with upper bounds and lower bounds as inputs, for rolling up fourses patches.  

the bouncing ball (sports) analogy

This summer, with funding from Wesleyan University graduate program in Experimental Music, I embarked on a journey to characterize the modular synthesize industry.  To do this, I participated in two events: the Tokyo Festival of Modular Synthesizers; and Control Voltage Fair, in New York.

I had long had a bitter taste from such fairs, because of poor sales at the event, and also a certain loudness in the bazaar that is due to competing demonstrators.  For this reason, I would only go with a radical, experimental mentality, almost performative.  Also, due to the scholarly funding, I could adopt a researcher's attitude towards the technology, akin to Georgina Born's ethnography of IRCAM.  Thus, my tack and proposal was to research the current culture of modular synthesizers, through the aesthetics of booth (beeth?) presentations, and any techno-shamanic folklore passed around by participants at these events.

Part of my strategy at these events, was to be aloof to the competitive sales atmosphere, by trying to present the radical ideas that my business has been known for over the years.  Paper circuits as experimental prototype formed the throat of this thrust.  I have been working for several months on a new line of euro-rack modules, and since this is exactly this format that predominates at modular fairs, I focused on a paper display for the new pieces.

Euro-rack is a standardized format for modular synthesis, using mono-mini plugs and cords, a "4U" height, and most importantly, a bi-polar power supply of +12 and -12 volts DC.  My other two businesses, Ciat-Lonbarde and Shbobo, are based on uni-polar power supplies of 9 volts and 3.3 volts respectively; the 9 volts is for analog from a single battery or wallwart, and 3.3 volts is a USB digital device.  In porting concepts over to the euro-rack specification, I decided to create a new business, named "Ieaskul F. Mobenthey".  All these names come from a single drawing from 2002, titled "Stores of the Mall", that I hope to display proudly on the release of the new modules.  It is really a format for a bantam business; the Stores of the Mall is a 'tent' that generates new sub-stores, rather than trying to maintain a single aesthetic at the locus of a singular business.

To manifest "Stores of the Mall" in physical form, I decided to build some conceptual synthesizers out of cardboard boxes and extremely fine, Japanese "washi" paper, provided by my mother-in-law at her business, Tapiro Creative, LLC.  Each box represents a separate business; Ciat-Lonbarde and Shbobo are finely lettered signage on wonderfully textured earth-tones.  However, it is the box for Ieaskul F. Mobenthy that received the most attention, because it is the most hypothetical at the moment.  I used bright green washi to wrap a box about the size of a small euro-rack cabinet.  Then I rendered the current working designs of Ieaskul's designs, and printed them on cards that were affixed to the front of the box, thus making a virtual, paper modular for display at my booth.  Also on display was a working paper circuit prototype of the innards of one of these designs, further enhancing the radical paper motif.

Stores of the Mall: the radical washi synth

On to the events!  First was the Tokyo Festival of Modular, on June 7 and 8.  The venue, Super Deluxe, is a mid-size basement club serving cold beer and snacks.  Having no raised stage, the "headliners" tables spilled out into the space, which was littered with many black-draped merchandise tables.  Of course, there were many local Japanese manufacturers, that I had never encountered before, making some very enigmatic equipment.  Also, a good sampling of American and a few European synth makers were there.

Tokyo Festival of Modular

Of course, the name "Festival of Modular" implies that it will feature modules, most probably in the euro-rack format.  However, there were a few standalone type instruments, and my booth, except for its "conceptual paper eurorack" was in the minority category of handhelds and unique boxes.

Stores of the Mall @ Tokyo Festival of Modular

Kirito at the Little Bits station

The sound was overpowering, extremely loud cacophony of mixed sequences and other blips and bloops.  I regret that I had not recorded the sound, for the pain it had caused my ears may have become bliss when re-listening at low volumes on a home stereo.  There, I could analyze it and perhaps enjoy it like an atmosphere of ambient frogs on a hot summer night.

Each station, representing a store or manufacturer or other vendor of synthesizer modularity, would normally be setting up some sort of "jam" consisting of sequenced pulses.  The use of sequencer modules is predominant.  Some of the more interesting stations, however, focused on idiosyncratic, non-linear and un-striated sound assemblages.  I chose to focus my attention on the first island, a grouping of four stations, three from America and one from Russia.

Scott Jaeger

Scott is a resident of Seattle, where he runs "The Harvestman," a series of euro-rack designs that have interesting names and function.  For example, the "Piston Honda" is a sort of 3-dimensional wavetable synthesizer, but its name suggests more mundane origins; did Scott's Honda Civic inspire a sophisticated synthesis for its emulation?  He said yes, but we didn't go into details.  Scott spent some time in graduate school, where he designed and implemented these modules.

Another research area was an esoteric Soviet synthesizer, the Polivoks.  Scott worked with the designer Vladimir Kuzmin to bring back the "bizarre, agressive, and entirely unique character" in euro-rack format.  The filter, for example, uses no external capacitors, and relies solely on the non-linear and contingent capacitance inside the silicon components.  It looks like Scott is skilled at compartmentalizing his business into unique sub-groups with strong identities.

Each of the participants from afar, due to baggage restrictions, brought only a small suitcase worth of modules, about one typical segment of a euro-rack system.  Thus they chose only the most important modules, and it is a comparative analysis of each distillation that proved most insightful.  Harvestman's aesthetic is uniform in color, with orange knobbage over an aluminum background.  However, there is a certain pragmatism in the layout, reflecting the idiosyncratic nature of the modules themselves.

All of Harvestman's aluminum face-plates are manufactured in Cincinnati.  To some collectors of euro-rack modules, a consistent aluminum appearance is very important, harkening back to the earliest days of Doepfers.  Since I am considering using other materials in face-plates, I always ask makers' opinions on material.  Scott finds the company in Cincinnati very convenient and cheap, but says that he personally has no problem with alternative materials.   There are about three reasons to use alternative materials in the face-plate: simply to introduce a new color and instant recognition to one's brand; because aluminum is conductive, some touch sensitive surfaces need to be implemented as circuit boards; circuit boards as a material are lighter, and I would say more immanent in that the circuit is its own container...  

For more thoughts on manufacturing, I looked across the table to another resident of the Pacific Northwest, this time from Portland:

Josh Holley

Josh is president of Malekko Heavy Industry, which makes some guitar pedals, and many euro-rack modules.  Josh is skilled at networking with other designers, to license and adapt modules for a maximum variety under one roof.  In fact, his main business now seems to be the Dark Space manufacturing center, that offers its services to all synthesizer designers to assemble their product, and even ship it for them.  Thus skills in integration are what makes his business tick.

A glance at the Malekko distillation yields a sense of uniformity, whilst representing many different lines.  Each different line, or sub-brand of Malekko, is differentiated by subtle appearances of changing fonts, knob size, or most importantly, layout decisions.  A foremost example is the layout of Wiard modules, which segregate knobs on top from patch points below, whereas many other designers choose to integrate knobs and jacks, so that functionality flows smoothly from manual control to patching.

Cyrus Makarechian

Another integrator, Cyrus, runs the new Muffwiggler store, in Los Angeles.  He shares business duties with Mike McGrath, who created the namesake of the store, the Muffwiggler forum.  This forum is devoted to analog synthesizers and synthesis in general, and it remains one of the most heavily trodden places to discuss such topics on the internet.  It was a natural outgrowth to start an internet store, that showcases all the mainstream modules, but according to Cyrus, it also sells the more idiosyncratic and esoteric modules, found by combing through all the accumulated forum discussions.

A look at Cyrus' suitcase sized rack shows many different kinds of modules, constructed of different materials (clear plastic, circuit board, as well as traditional aluminum), some with enigmatically sparse legend and thus an intuitive demand on performer.  In representing a divers forum of synthesynthesists, a most pragmatic look is achieved, and also the sense that Cyrus may find sublime new connections due to the overlapping philosophies.

Roman Filipov

Most mysterious was this Russian guy with a fancy paisley shirt, and a pronounced penchant for hard liquor from the bar.   Roman has remade some buchla modules for eurorack, with his own twists, so to speak.  He had a buchla module out on the table for reference, and it had the trademark separation of banana and mini-jacks, for cv and audio respectively.  There are many opinions on banana plugs versus mini-jacks, and the various systems that represent them, but Buchlas were the only systems that represented both.  It is because of a certain structuralist viewpoint by the Don, that control voltages, like a conductor, are semiotic, and audio signals are spectral; the two should never mix.  Roman's euro-rack incarnations of Buchla modules stick to the universal mini-jack for all connections, thus re-blurring the distinction between symbol and sound; this move is important for most experimental electronic music, where modulation and meaning are allowed and coerced to trade places at frequency.

Remembering the previous conversation with Scott Jaeger, who had resurrected old Soviet circuits, I asked Roman if the esoteric circuits of his homeland interested him.  He replied that he doesn't care; one often develops and interest in the other, and Roman was very interested in West Coast California 20th century circuits.  In fact, he was to donate his old schematics to Scott, who was much more interested in reproducing those esoterica.  Roman, a russian who focused on west coast california circuit designs and Scott, a Seattle man who went deep in russia for weird ideas.

Although Roman was free to make changes in the Buchla layout, such as the standardizing of mini-jacks, he chose to preserve the sense of uniformity in aluminum, font and blue pin-lines that mark a Buchla's face.  Buchlas have a lot more pragmatic decisions in layout, such as the curved arrows used in cramming in extra functionality, but they do look very uniform.  There are many ways to achieve it, but uniformity is always important in a modular aesthetic; it is how a brand is known, and how it works with other brands is an curatorial decision on the part of the synthesist-collector.

For those makers who chose not to build euro-rack modules, there are more options, in enclosure shape and size, besides those already mentioned choice of faceplate material, font, and other legend features.  Here's a synth maker to watch out for, from Peru, Atomosynth:

Alfredo Aliaga

Alfredo's modules can actually fit in euro-rack, but he chooses to display them as standalone instruments.  The combination of smoked plexiglass, clean etched lines, and sometimes some lime green plastic, make them quite unique.  It's like my son, he is addicted to fishing, and we go to the fishing tackle store.  Bass is this ultimate fish because it angrily snaps at colorful plastic jelly and ASMR producing lures, lures that ultimately serve the fisherman a dose of addictive candy unboxing as well.  Go Alfredo!

My own brand is marked by a pronounced lack of candy, although there is good wood, sauced generously with tung oil.  However, I do not have a business card, and although some triangular poster cards still exist from previous days, I was lacking any paraphernalia, so when constructing washi paper circuits at Tapiro Creative, LLC, I re-purposed some fancy calligraphy cards from the trash.  My mother-in-law had experimented with layout of a phrase, "learning the sound of rain," and although she wished the world to not see her failed calligraphy, i found the black brush strokes fertile ground for ballpoint insertion of circuit diagrams:

business card for ciat-lonbarde

Here's some more happenings at Tokyo Festival of Modular

5G, a Tokyo Modular store, brought a wall!

Hikari, nice vintage 50s looking cases

I think this is "JMT," a Japanese Analog/Noise Booth

My wife and son jamming little bits n' Korg

Headliner: Keith Fullerton Whitman

A fine threesome of electronic performers...

Synth T-shirts: Merchandise about merchandise

---

Modular event number two was the Control Voltage Fair, held in Brooklyn, on June 21, 2014.  The specific location was Ten Eyck street, a real portal Hague of the new world, crammed in between an oily river and a bunch of Chinese merchants, it also contained many nose-rings and kindly death metalists, as well as other fuzzy burlap berets and various accordion toters...  Brooklyn, on a cool day, during a "river to river" music festival was a great place to have an open door to a dark warehouse spilling out loud modular sounds.  In all of the following pictures, note the completely different light, it being a natural, blue-sky day.  Super Deluxe in Tokyo, a basement at night, had great spot-lighting, but the warehouse in Brooklyn had no artificial lighting at all, just skylights and garage door.

old industrial Brooklyn: site of Control Voltage Fair

Speaking of loud modular sounds, having endured the cacophony of the Tokyo Festival of Modular, I had all but sworn to completely "go conceptual" and leave the amplifier off at my table of this event.  Turns out, the space was about twice as tall and half as populated with beeth, so there was a little bit more room for sound.  Thanks to Abby and Matt who offered me a K8 PA piece last minute there.  I did find the sonic environment here a little bit less aggressive, and the open garage door afforded natural light and escaped many slap echoes, also there was more of a holistic view on synthesis, with video processing and conceptual emphasis strong at the Harvestworks booth:

Brian Moran/Adam Kendall, video processing modular

I set up booth similar to the Tokyo Fest, with much paper concepts, but also a quite clearer sounding demonstration of touch-organs.  Next to me was Mark Verbos, of Verbos Electronics.  You know it's great how names work; Mark is not a loud or loquacious dude, but his Buchla adaptations do feature the verbose legend of the original.  Or at least verbose compared to my stuff and other enigma variations.  Mark was a nice guy and I enjoyed learning about his clean, professional aesthetic.  He's repaired many Buchlas, and from this he got great ideas for his own euro-rack adaptations.  Like Roman's work, the Mark's use mini-plugs solely, shunning again the structuralist impulse of banana separation.  Also the modules have a strong clean aesthetic, with the classy pin-lines of the original, but a little more strength of color contrast; he uses blocks of black ink  next to bare aluminum to help break up the monotony.  Note his brand-shirt, grey of aluminum, black of silkscreen, white accents and red knobs.  Very clean brand vision:

Mark Verbos

Control, the store in Brooklyn, is another strongly designed brand.  In fact, the co-owner Daren went to graphic design school in Iowa.  They collect all types of "mostly" euro-rack modules, and have a great showroom that you can come in and play around for hours.  To CVF they brought shirts, cards and a nice stand of all sorts of modules:

Control

Pittsburgh Modular and Make Noise had a new piece of paraphernalia: coozies:

Pittsburgh Modular

Now, Meme Antenna, I had heard about before.  I was talking with a film-maker about wooden synthesizers for sale in Japan.  I had never really sold synths there, even though we go there every year to see my wife's family.  Adachi Tomomi understood completely, and informed me that I would never sell wooden electronic instruments in Japan; he pulled out some of his own instruments, made in tupperware, and declared them more viable on the Japanese market, because they approach the cool, club-like industrial texture of powder-black metal cases.  I went to Japan to find out more about the flaw in wooden electronics.  My hypothesis was that the "ki" of wood is an ancient one, used for housing fine clothing, family relics, and of course, ancestral ghosts and natural spirits in shrine usages; electronic synthesizers are related to ballistics, communication and war.  The two morphic resonances are difficult to mix, but over the years this encasure will become easier as a process of mutual negotiation is played out.  One reason for visiting Japan was to participate in my wife's grandfather's 37th death anniversary; this is an important year for according to Shinto, he may now become part of an ancestral spirit, losing individual identity for the sake of a more powerful family entity.  Perhaps there is a similar process unfolding in materials for electronics, as wood, metal, plastic, and silicon can be blended more and more.  I saw a little bit of wood in Tokyo Festival of Modular, but it only is used to emphasize a certain vintage feel. 

Meme Antenna

What is the fate of euro-rack?  I should have gotten into it five years ago, perhaps even ten years ago, but I'm happy with staying out for so long, working with wooden synths, single-rails, powered by battery.  I did a lot of experiments with connectors other than mini-plugs and banana jacks; the best were the brass nodes, that reacted to touch connections with intuitive consequences.  I now dive into my euro-rack work with a few new modules; more on that in later posts.  Musing on all the hubbub over this format, one friend of mine postulated that it's all going to a sort of big drum machine, a steady state beat box.  I hope not, and I know that modulations are the exit from steadiness.  The website of Steady State Fate has a fine essay on this topic, about initial conditions, the butterfly effect, and attractors et al.  Ironically, it was SSF that provided the main beat of Control Voltage Fair, a two-step bass and splash that made me dance bouncing up and down.  I heard every twist of the tempo knob; unlike techno performers who keep it steady, Andrew Morelli was undaunted and moved it around up and down, and made me re-evaluate my habitual cool-boy dance bounce, and ask, what am I doing here?

an omen of the future: steady state rhythms

Apologies to any synth makers who were at these events, kindred spirits, whom I didn't cover in these pages.  There were many great ones, but this comparative survey has wound its course and I go to my pillow to rest and plan triangular oscillators and rounded chaotic integrators.

Sounds nice, too!

The title of this post relates to Marx's most basic theory of dissing the bourgeoisie: by pointing out that they trade money for commodities, and leverage up the value of those same commodities to make more money.  This is in dialectic, according to Marx, to the other way around, CMC, which is "what farmers do," trade a commodity for money and back again for another commodity, like a dental appointment.  He says that, if anything is leveraged from CMC, it is only by mistake.  I am at a point in my life where I beg to differ, or at least to argue for a more sophisticated treatment.  Phirst of all, the CMC should not be discounted as a leverage tool, because commodities can have immensely more value based on the situation they are received in; a dental appointment could be crucial compared to excess stockpiles of wheat.  You could say that CC, or bartering is the most natural and profitable, but he leaves this out.  I would even posit that most 21st century cookoos think in termes of CKC, the exchange of commodities for karma, and then back to commodities- just think about how often you analyze your life this way and you will find that it happens, or is made to happen resonantly. 

Back to MCM.  Marx thinks of it in only a one-dimensional, most dissingly way, where he thinks of the commodity in the middle as completely fixed.  I see it as a liquid, or a cloud of many disparate things, dare I say a Mille Plateux.  Or a body without organs; a becoming wolf; a nomadic monad, a wine-drunk philosopher pissing.  I have piles of wood purchased from an old man Dave in Massachussetts, a real artisan who sold me catalpha, mulberry and sassafras. In addition, my stockpile includes old leaden cathode ray tubes, wound transformers, enamel wire, BC556 NPN transistors, strange circuit boards layed out like a pagan ceremony, not to mention pagan ceremonies themselves.  It is this cloud of commodities, the CcCCcccCCC, that is the ham in my money-bread sandwich.  So why feel guilty in synthesizing a lever?

Recently, I have had to do electronics component buying apart from the regular channels Mouser, my "white goods" solution.  You know this is so racializing, and it gets more so.  Most of it is a paranoia of the Chinese, so little understood and so popular these days.  In fact I do a lot of business back and forth.  We all know most chips come from there even if sold on Mouser's pearly white pages.  Everytime I get a hot new synth board back from the plant in shenzheng, I get hot boxed by my Beijing affiliate MengQi who gets the board straightaway.  Turns out I've had to make four large purchases from four completely different outlets in different countries.  The following list-story is characterizing each, with a slightly obfuscated name, to highlight some of the humor and spice of my business day:

• Stella Gressive, despite her name, she is very polite, although I can't tell where she is from.  Her company, Fartle, makes really nice Nickel Metal Hydride rechargeable battery packs.  They are out of Germany, although they deal with me out of their office in Persnickety, upstate NY.  She is all about invoices; me and Steve Kornico have to constantly update a google spreadsheet to "make it official" before purchasing the batteries.  Invoices are required for customs and for trade agreements; they don't want people to buy their batteries and then resell them at a jack-up, i.e. MCM bourgeouis; Fartle is thus communist.  OEMs, or Original Equipment Manufacturers, however, are M:CcccCCCcc:M's because they take many disparate commodities, synthesize a new "white good" or synthesizer, and leverage it for profit.  Steve Kornico and I had to prove we were such a communist-friendly company by talking with our capitalist lawyer and producing another google-friendly word doc.  To recap, Stella Gressive wanted a word doc and an excel spreadsheet.
• Shirley Tang, in Hong Kong, handled a recent order of metal potentiometers.  They could be gray market, but only because they are beautiful gray metal.  They are made in Japan, shipped to Hong Kong, and stockpiled at a "holdings company".  Holdings Companies are just that, like a warehouse, but in Hong Kong, there is also an opiate tinge to all business.  In fact, I have two pieces of evidence to support this.  One, they advertise "opium of the Chinese IC" on their website, meaning their transistors are addictive plus cause blurry psychadelia.  Two, in sealing the deal they sent many "Chinese checker" pix of the product to "make sure" I'm getting the product, and I noticed the tape around the box is encrusted with resinous roaches.  I connected with Shirley's holding company through AliBaba, apparently a silk road/abu dubai reference; the worm is the spice.
• Mooney Tai, the other Chinese connection, handles solar panels.  Mooney's main feature is the power of pure return/complaint system.  They have a warehouse full of millions of different sizes and ratings of small solar panels meant for garden sculpture.  Some are real hazy, half baked affairs, but the one I had tested off of ebay and spec'd out was really nice, waterproof.  This is not the one they sent me, but a real piece of maple syrup that I am returning tomorrow with a note on Andrew Jackson, saying I want a 60xninety mm instead of 135xseventy5mm, and I want it MaShang, or "on a horse", i.e. ASAP.  I suspect they wanted me to eat their inferior product but I plan to complain and return until the cycle is complete.
• Finally, we get to Kenneth, at DRP, in Iowa.  He has been so nice the whole time to me.  The Chinese businessmen are very quick and comprehensive in their emails, as if their life depended on it, but Kenneth is laid back, like a farmboy who makes guitar pedals.  I am still waiting on the payment link for knobs he said he would send to me; not like the Chinese businesses who try to do the whole deal in one day.  Kenneth spends time to talk with me on the phone, I think he enjoys putting the phone to his ear and laying me to rest.  Not that he's better, this is just the world you dive into when you leave the safe machined pages of Mouser, a juxtaposed realm of ultra-fast industrial zones and small town dial-up consultancies.

Flambeau. That word incites to organize, and celebrate organization. Recently, I purchased two large, 24 compartment Flambeau boxes, to put my capacitor collection into spreadsheet-like compartments. The reason I suddenly have a lot of capacitors, is because I started a new project, called Tocante, based on the industrial values, called preferred numbers, used to grade components, and the musical tuning they generate when used in oscillators. There is a musicology here, and I defer to a separate post to use spreadsheets and graphs to show the uniqueness of this tuning. This post is about organizers!

Organization by Talenti: too deep for electronic components, much better for gelato.

I found these deep Flambeaus in the dumpster of the materials institute, Johns Hopkins University. They were labeled "Piyush" and contained metals embedded in epoxy. I have since used them for the bulk of my components storage. Chaos-pack works here, because the components are quickly used and in bulk, so there's almost no point to sorting them out.

Another deep and long Flambeau with Chaos-Pack

Now this milky Flambeau, since it has 24 compartments, suits a high degree of organization, for components graded in preferred numbers. Serendipitously, electronic components are graded in multiples of three, according to the E3, E6, or E12 scale, so you can see "103" and "102" are in the same column. This box makes it easy to see magic numbers and the composition of scales more clearly, plus it has room for some spare inductors and diodes. Bigger capacitors in the back, and smaller in the front: a musical scale that goes from low to high. The reason it starts on 223 and ends on 471 is because the primary scale is from 103 to 102 and the extensions provide alternative pitch clusters by doubling or halving their value; capacitors in parallel doubles, series halves.

This is an organizer I inherited from my dad; it held locks, nuts, bolts, washers, gaskets, and cotter pins. Now it holds the 10 colors of "Johnson Banana Plug" as well as a few other chaos-packed drawers of components.

Storage by cardboard box: for counterpoint here is part of the wood storehouse.

To work with solar panels, you have to sit outside.

Prototyping electronics, one rarely gets to work outside. Testing solar panels, however, is a good chance to get out, at least for a little bit.

What I have are a hundred pieces of six volt, hundred milliampere panels. I am using them to charge two varta three-packs of nickel metal hydride cells, totalling a normative voltage of seven point two. So, of course I made a switching boost circuit, comprising an n-channel mosfet that momentarily pulls an inductor to ground, but when current develops through the inductor to positive, a capacitive coupling to pnp turns the mosfet off. Thus the inductor circuit oscillates at its ideal, between 8000 to 320000, depending on load. I initially wasted a lot of time with so-called "joule thieves," but these were the least efficient, compared to a snappy mosfet action plus tightly factory bundled inductor.

So, my only modification to check outside with the panel was the hypothesis that, when the battery was completely discharged, the switcher should be inhibited, yielding pure DC through the inductor and diode. So I made a simple PNP switch comparing panel voltage to battery voltage, to control the switcher bias. I discharged a battery pack completely, and attached it to the circuit. DC flowed and switcher was off, success. However, I noted that the efficiency was only about 150% better, and most importantly, the NiMH only stayed below 6 volts for a very short period of time. Thus, I'm not going to add this mod, because it really doesn't help. I've found that a NiMH acts like a capacitor when discharged, so it charges up really fast. It is only when it is up at its voltage, that injecting more current is what re-alchemizes its chemistry. Also there is various literature pointing to the aggressive pulsing of a switcher actually helps keep the chemistry good in a battery. The most important thing about this switcher is that the panel can be small; it is matched to the wattage dimensions of the battery, and that it works even in room light, so it is always adding charge.

I'll talk about this later, but there is a deep thesis in solar powered electronic music. The idea is that you should be playing during the day while it charges, and use the battery powered sounder at night, around the campfire, to scare away ghosts, or in a cave, to hear the galleries and depths.

Tocante has made a version of the rolz-5 circuits. It is an expansion board for the plumbutter. Plumbutter has that nice voltage control for each of its rhythm generators (rolz) but they lack the pure crunchy ultrasound paradox capability of the simple rolz. This expansion board is to make up for that; the rolz are tuned by capacitors, in the range of 1 microfarad, through 1.5, 2.2, 3.3, 4.7, 6.8, up to 10 microfarads (allegro to larghissimo). The odd beats and strange interjections are caused by wiring them to each other. They are all "brown nodes" as on the plumbutter, androgynous, both input and output. Here, they are processed by plumbutter's ultrasound filter, and a gongue and snare drum.

Just spent a full day at Control in New York, checking wares against the Eurorack standard. The modules I was checking are a years worth of prototyping and design, known as Ieaskul F. Mobenthey. Ieaskul's masthead concept is that Eurorack will die along with the whole analog synthesis wave, and he is interested in exacerbating the death through the use of a paradox wave. This wave is achieved through bounds/bounce oscillators; simple triangle waves take a standard fm modulation of their slope (bounce), and also they let you control how wide and where they bounce back and forth (bounds). When bounds are set to zero or negative, the oscillator does not work in a standard way, but spirals up into the fastest signal it can make to try to resolve its paradoxical inputs. The denum, swoop, and fourses modules all exploit some version of this concept. Denum is the go-to module for versatility as monolithic oscillator; in addition to the new form of bounds modulation in exponential and linear forms, with attenuverter, it also has an exp-lin bipolar VCA, so basically you can roll your own Sidrax organ with these modules. Ieaskul offers a barre controller for playing the parameters of his modules; they are all tuned to a higher impedance for using piezos as inputs for every one. Swoop is also good with a piezo bar- it takes raw boundaries and tries to bounce between them. Like I said, it exhibits a paradox wave when no-inputted: it has zero width boundaries and thus tries to oscillate "infinitely" high. It is thus a sort of triangular filter, like a waveshaper, but it can be autonomous too.

These paradox waves reveal something about the material of the electronics themselves- the silicon layout of opamps, copper inductances, capacitance relationships.

Now, Fourses and Sprott are the two wider modules. The price is reflective of that- 222 for the aforementioned 8hp modules, and 333 for these 12hp modules- a relationship of two to three. Fourses is four bounds/bounce oscillators bouncing off of each other. It is a reworking of an old kit sold by Ciat-Lonbarde under the same name. In fact most of the year spent designing Mobenthey was tackling questions about porting this module to Eurorack. I have recently released the paper circuits I used to prototype, along with an "intersexon" paper, as a new line for solderers to make their own paper version of fourses. Note the papers run on 9 volts positive, not +12, -12 like in Eurorack, thus they retain some of the older ideas of the original Fourses, like arp-serge converters, and a jellybean quad switch, the cd4066, that became dg212 in Eurorack land.

Fourses Papers 

Sprott, finally is a modular version of J.C. Sprott's work, that I have been following for a long time. Here, paradox means, what is the relationship between a second-order resonant wave equation, and a third-order non-linear jerk chaos equation? Simply put, this module can be a simple resonant filter, or a self-triggering chaotic oscillator, but in between, in certain ranges, there is operation where it is a "hairy filter".

I hope the pricing for these modules is sweet to you. Likewise, I hope the panel appearance is just right, in its snot-colored yellow fiberglass, copper cartouches, and everlasting halloweener orange and green LED indicators that shine disperse spookily through the fiberglass. No apologies for lack of aluminum here. But note that I started a fourth company, Tocante, that explains the appeal of copperplate instruments in detail. When I visited Control in Brooklyn, they didn't really flinch about the lack of aluminum, and that surprised me. Maybe they do look good in fact? I know that I would like to have a bunch by themselves in a rack; these four do make a compleat system of control voltages, autonomous and not, oscillators, strange oscillators, filters and jerk cirques. Mr. Cortini will ask for a dedicated box of these modules (with no outside influences) and I like his instinct, however egotistical it makes me feel.

Ieaskul F. Mobenthey now Includes Paypal Buttons to Order!

"Versioning," for me, is duplicating a file I'm working on (code, circuit board, essay) at various official and casual points in its development, and applying a number to that point in time. This is obviously for purposes of back-up, but it also provides a history of the development, and finally, an aesthetic trajectory of the "piece." Martin Howse's book "xxxxxx," has a piece about versioning, using the "diff" command line to deconstruct a literary work.

Versioning is usually an additive process: new developments are marked by an positive increment, in integer or fraction, of the number. I prefer negative versioning, for a practical reason once again; decrements of the number result in an alphabetical order with the newest at the top, not at the bottom, so I can always find it. So an idea for negative versioning comes from the default presets of an operating system.

However, there are teleological implications for negative versioning. The standard incremental idea mirrors the capitalist corporation, prioritizing growth, as a sort of judicially recognized organism, with death and decay surgically removed by integer set theory. I know that my software will become an artifact someday, perhaps not immediately useful, perhaps only running in an emulation of a laptop. But it will remain intentionally organized, a crystal growth, and I will be dead. So does my software need to grow? I propose that when I die, whatever low number my code is at, becomes zero, or perhaps someone else brings it to zero. That is, it becomes burned. But on the way, there is the version one, not as the first hacked stab at a program, but a distilled idea of what the code should be. You see, negative versioning implies the philosophical quest for a truth, or an alchemical distillation of code. It is more sustainable than positive versioning; it does not emphasize growth but decay and pruning of unnecessary limbs.

Martin Howse, to me, is a writer on microcontrollers; he makes me happy to program an 8-bit corkwafer even though these are fetishes of the highest degree. He writes on embedded philosophy, asking, "where is the site of code?" It could be the hardware, the software, the embedded os, the hackerspace of it all. His instrument on the black plague could easily be a negative version.

Qua ("kind") is the presence of feedback
and self talking that
all the nodes at least
indirectly affect each other
sometimes goes inactive
if not self stimulating -
uses positive + negative feedback
to causing damping and
 re incantation...

mechanical thinking causes
our hua to become "humanens
electrikes mechanicales". We must
use our huas to make mechanicals
into mequas and electronics
into elequas, and
have meqelequahua
harmony of the quas

hua mua
is the material pressure
of people make

d'vises make stuff happe
qua don't make a'nuthin happen
human qua don't need to do anything,
just have fun and talk to each
other, that's where they make
"good times" happen. good times is better
than stuff. we don't need mehanicals
to make stuff- you can make mequa
that make good-times, but no square
douz cuz they all want stuff.
it seems like we're already havin
good-times with electricity,
but really there's stuff
bein made by the good-times
we're
thinkin we're having
cuz all the squares are
countin our d'vises and our
electricity as fast as their d'vises
can count. We can make elequa
that do nothing except good-times, and
no square would be interested becuase
they can't copy goodtimes so you don't need
to copyright your goodtine elequa and
then all the hua can keep making elequa.

P Blaster, 3rd Period (of suns), 1023
e-u-ah!
is understood by squares
as "electronic fields".
A better
name might be electronic good-times,
because you can measure a field with an
electronic devise but you can't measure good
times, you can only feel them. The e-u-ah
good times move very fast, most go
right thru us without us feeling them.
You definitely don't feel electronic,
you just feel a few e-u-ah!

the hole in the elquamequa hua
is if you take it too seriously b'cause
then your a square! Money and power
is a sort of pressure which is also
a kind of good-times, right?

Carl Sagan has written about the
good-times of suns.

you can't plan elequa,
you only know when you
start feelin good-times.

---

You don't feel alright
touch your hand for a BACK wido
the fer has no bite

A BACK wido has bitten your hand, destroying
fur:::: All the little fur-furs:
all your doing-your own things furs..
The stabb sucks furs into
the central pit. Manipulation of the
central pit means death, by sparx.
A trans-ob post (trans-observation post)
glass wall bubble for looking into
the dimension of the fers.
Seen, not vacuumed, no manipulating
them into the central pit. The trans-ob
post turns inwards and inwards, the
balls let you watch but not let you touch.

---

Dear Todd Bailey:
I have decided to use Blue LEDs in the next kit I will be celling at Ciat-LONBARDE. This is because a lot of my clients often ask to have the blue starers in their custom ambraziers. Instead of putting green, red, and yellow LEDs for a cheaper price, I will put high-quality red white and blue LEDs for a slightly hire fee, so the customer can make customizations without having to "add money". You can replace red with that "tru green" you made with a ble eleedee and a yeller one [extremely well censored and redacted passage about two centences long], the customer can put the different color.

The economy is not as important as good times,
[signed Peter Blasser]

It must have been good times before lunacy was made into a science.

old prototype oval machine

Here's a challenge: take this gutted oval machine that once accomplished analog madness and install a digital device inside that tries to do the same. Immediately there are two features, the nodes and the nobs. The nobs we will get to, but the nodes are the primary concern. How to make autonomous nodes that when connected by flesh or wire to others, act as a web of rewirings? Reminds me of Gartnerspeak: nexus-of-forces, internet-of-things, web-of-rewirings.

As Dave Jones would say, keep your mind open when it comes to Microcontrollers, and avoid fanboys. I have been, and i can safely say that this corkfield will represent multiple industrial partners, including STM and Microchip. There are many reasons, that I will explore later, for my adherence to Microchip. First and foremost, they are a historical generator of 8bit chips, which are cute, and that assembly language is totemic in its cultural capital. Second, they have low breakpoints for a chip with DAC, quite a rara avis. Third, I have extensively researched the programming routines of various chips, and found the PIC ICSP (in circuit serial programming) most robust for this kind of nodal, code-as-material application. Finally, they claim to have a large market share, as evidenced in the following presentation page (note that Renesas AFAIC is only for automobiles and has no low-point DAC):

8bit microshares

Humans are the spectators at a zoo, but have you ever thought the animals watch you too? In collaboration with Teb, a landscape architect, and a sustainability expert, we have re-conceptualized the zoo exhibit, for humans and animals to watch each other. This has precedent, in one of the great activities that children bring about from our public spaces- the petting zoo. Here, goats are touched, not fed, and sometimes even combed and massaged. People interact with animals on an equal basis and sometimes serve them.

Heavy Metal Goat

Also note the heavy metal goat, of France, who passed away recently. This goat enjoyed the vibrations and performance of touring bands on the DIY farm. Can we bring this posture to the public zoo? Maybe this goat liked heavy metal, but I would propose synthesizer installations as a solution for the fox enclosure.

The enclosure in question has a habitual path set into the terrain, probably by an animal psychology gone obsessive by being caged. Let's take this as a starting point, the habitual path. Can we modify it? Teb suggests that a red cedar tree can act as a beacon for a path, potentially extending its bounds. There is a shed that the neighboring tiger inhabits, unhappily. We propose to remove this tiger, tear up the fence, and extend the habitual path into the shed. The path is now for animals and humans, but it was initially etched by a fox.

remove tiger, alter habitual path, add stone altar

We're going to add a diversity of animals to the enclosure, ones that co-inhabit, such as deer. Now its almost ready. We extend the habitual path into the shed by planting red cedars there, as Teb suggested. We have buildings and grounds dig up an old stone altar from their lot, and install it at the apex of the path, inside the shed. This stone altar is wired up for sound, to facilitate synthesizer installation artists. Food, drink, and smoking are prohibited to keep the animals safe.

Now we blast open the fence to let the humans in.