Palinsesto

How to play it. The eight knobs are the ones you reach for: mix, time, repeats, space, memory, dust, loss and wear. The three toggles choose the delay's character, how the memory reads itself back, and where the automaton acts. Bypass with B or space; hold F to freeze; tapT for tempo; C collects a loop from the memory. Everything else is inside, and under the dip switches.

Ramps, after Chase Bliss. Press ramp (or R) and turn a knob: you set a second position, marked by a green dot. The knob now travels between the two, over the ramp time, once or back and forth, upward or downward or to random points, as dips 9 to 11 decide. Double-click in ramp mode to remove one. The blue ring around each knob shows where it actually is, after ramps and modulation.

Memoria. A minute of stereo memory that is always recording. Two heads read fragments back: scan walks slowly through the past; collect pulls fragments from anywhere within reach, like an echo collector; loopholds one fragment and repeats it at any speed, forwards or backwards. Overwrite writes what the heads read back into the memory, so old material is layered under new, like ink on a scraped page.

Tempo. One to four playback heads, after the magnetic drum echoes; a tape character that glides when the time changes, a digital one that does not, and a reverse one that plays each repeat backwards. An interval can sit in the feedback loop, so every repeat climbs a fifth or an octave, or a sequence of fifth, octave and fourth. Delay-line pitch shifting after Dattorro ("Effect design", JAES, 1997).

Polvere. Up to sixty-four grains at once from the last five seconds, with size, density, position, spray, pitch and its spread, reversal and a window that runs from smooth to square (Truax, Computer Music Journal, 1988; Roads, Microsound, 2001).

Spettro. A phase vocoder (Dolson 1986; Laroche and Dolson 1999) that blurs the spectrum in time, throws away the quiet bins and caps the bandwidth the way a low-bitrate codec does (Brandenburg, 1999), loses whole packets, shifts and scrambles. Freeze holds the last spectrum and keeps its phases turning, so it sustains. With the automaton toggle on spectrum, a one-dimensional cellular automaton decides, generation by generation, which of thirty-two bands of the whole sound may pass. Rule 110, the default, was proved universal by Matthew Cook (Complex Systems, 2004): the filter is a computer. On rhythm, the same automaton gates the effects sixteenth by sixteenth.

Cattedrale. Four allpass diffusers into an eight-line feedback delay network with a Householder matrix, damping in each line and slow modulation (Jot and Chaigne, 1991). Decay runs to sixty seconds and to infinity under freeze. Shimmer puts a pitch shifter inside the loop.

Usura. The whole output passes through a worn tape: wow and flutter as a moving delay (after Arnardottir, Abel and Smith's Echoplex model, 2008), saturation, generations that narrow the band, hiss, failures where the tape loses contact, and a low-pass gate that wobbles at random. Wear is the master amount.

Castello. The FX Wizard firmware of the Bastl Instruments Kastle 2, ported from its open source code (MIT licence, copyright Bastl Instruments; parameter maps by Marek Mach): delay, flanger, freezer, panner, crusher, slicer, pitcher, replayer and shifter, each with time, feedback, amount, stereo and the DJ filter mapped through the firmware's own curves, the eight slicer rhythms, the short feedback loop that colours every mode, and a trigger that grabs, restarts or fires. The trigger can come every bar or beat, from the automaton, from your transients, or from the button.

Nonna. After Bastl's microGranny 2, written from its manual rather than its code: six slots of sound, recorded from the input or taken from your song, played between a start and an end at any rate, forwards or backwards, crushed, shaped by attack and release, and cut into grains that repeat while their window crawls through the sample at the shift speed, sometimes changing direction at random. It plays as a drone, on the beat, on the automaton, or from MIDI notes at their pitch.

Timo. After Bastl's Thyme, "a sequencable robot operated digital tape machine": a tape delay whose time, feedback, tone, pitch and direction are set by an eight-step robot that walks with the tempo and glides from step to step, so the tape bends in pitch as its length changes.

Moto. Two LFOs with six shapes, a Lorenz attractor (1963) for motion that never repeats, an envelope follower, the automaton's density and gate, a random walk, the expression pad and the ramp: 12 sources, eight routings, any of the continuous parameters as a destination.

The dip switches.

1. trails: bypass lets the echoes and the reverb ring out.
2. miso: mono in, stereo out: the left input feeds both sides.
3. kill dry: only the effect, no dry signal.
4. latch: freeze latches on a tap instead of holding.
5. ping-pong: the delay bounces left and right.
6. parallel: every module hears the input alone, side by side, instead of one after another.
7. drive last: Carattere moves to the end of the chain.
8. triplets: synced times become triplets.
9. sweep up: ramps start at the knob and travel to the target.
10. bounce: ramps go back and forth instead of once.
11. random: ramps jump to random points between the two settings.
12. glitch: loud transients throw the output into short repeats.
13. gate: a noise gate on the input.
14. smooth speed: memory speed changes glide instead of jumping.
15. motor: bypass stops the tape like a motor losing power.
16. oscillate: feedback may pass 100% and run away, held by saturation.

Presets, each after a pedal or an idea:

• Palinsesto, after this pedal. The memory scans the last half minute, Rule 110 decides which bands of the spectrum may pass, and a little tape wear lies over everything.
• Generation loss, after Chase Bliss Generation Loss. A worn VHS deck: wow, flutter, hiss, a narrowing band and the moments where the tape loses contact.
• Blackhole, after Eventide Blackhole. A room the size of a weather system: forty seconds of decay, slow modulation, no pre-delay. Hold freeze to make it endless.
• Shimmer, after the shimmer of Strymon BigSky, and Eno and Lanois before it. An octave up inside the reverb loop: every note rises into the ceiling.
• Microcosm, after Hologram Microcosm and Mutable Instruments Clouds. Grains from the last seconds, scattered in pitch and position, over a reverb.
• Habit, after Chase Bliss Habit. An echo collector: fragments from anywhere in the last thirty seconds come back, overwriting what was there.
• Lossy, after Chase Bliss Lossy. A codec that keeps only what it thinks you will notice: missing bins, a ceiling on the band, lost packets.
• Thermae, after Chase Bliss Thermae. A tape delay whose repeats climb by a fifth, an octave and a fourth in turn.
• Freeze, after Electro-Harmonix Freeze. Hold the freeze footswitch: the spectrum stops and sustains under what you play next.
• Volante, after Strymon Volante and the magnetic drum echoes. Four playback heads on a spinning drum, tape colour, a little wobble.
• Mood, after Chase Bliss MOOD. A slipping micro-loop at half speed beside a wet room. Hold tap to collect a new loop.
• Plasma, after Gamechanger Audio Plasma. A high-voltage discharge through a xenon tube, as a waveshaper: only the loudest parts get through, in sparks.
• Shallow water, after Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water. A low-pass gate that wobbles at random, with the pitch wavering underneath.
• Ottobit, after Meris Ottobit Jr. and the early samplers. Six bits, a divided sample rate, a short repeat.
• Automaton, after Rule 30 and a Lorenz attractor. The automaton as a rhythm: it gates the effects sixteenth by sixteenth while the attractor moves the delay and the reverb.
• Breathing cathedral, after a cathedral that breathes. Ramps on the mix and the space knobs, so the room swells and recedes on its own.
• Kastle slicer, after the slicer of the Bastl Kastle 2 FX Wizard (ported from its open firmware). Eight-step rhythms gate the sound, a chance of flipped steps, the two sides offset.
• Kastle freezer, after the freezer of the Bastl Kastle 2 FX Wizard. Every bar a moment is grabbed and looped at a few hundred samples: a pitched drone made of what you played.
• Kastle replayer, after the replayer and pitcher of the Bastl Kastle 2 FX Wizard. A second of sound recorded, then played back slower and backwards while you overdub into it.
• Granny, after Bastl microGranny 2. The first three seconds of input go into a slot; grains of it repeat every eighth, crawling through the sample in random directions, a little crushed.
• Thyme robot, after Bastl Thyme, the sequencable robot-operated tape machine. A robot moves the tape: eight steps of length, feedback, tone, pitch and direction, gliding into each other.
• Init, after nothing. Everything at rest: a clean signal and a full set of possibilities.

In and out. A microphone or audio interface (the browser asks first; echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain are switched off so the signal stays as it is), a song from your computer, or a plucked test string (Karplus and Strong, 1983). The song never leaves your browser. Out to the speakers, into a lossless recorder, or the whole song processed offline into a WAV. MIDI in: CC 14 to 21 for the knobs, 22 bypass, 23 freeze, 24 tap, notes for Nonna, and clock for the tempo. Use headphones with a microphone. The engine runs sample by sample in an AudioWorklet and is checked in scripts/check-palinsesto.mts.

The stamp says RE: Rule 110 is Turing-complete, so whether the spectral mask ever settles into a repeating pattern is, for some starting rows, a question no program can answer in general.