canary

it goes quiet first

20 HP

A small bird on a real perch in a real brass cage, singing over your track. It breathes the room it's in. As the air gets thick the song shortens and the breath gets rough. Then it stops. Then it falls.

The CANARY panel: black, with a gold cast of a pair of lungs on it, the windpipe running down into the top of a half-round brass cage. A small yellow bird stands on a perch in the cage over a lamp. Under the cage, a grille. Knobs SIZE, NERVE, SONG, TAUGHT and TWO, a lit button RESCUE with four small bottles beside it, and ten jacks.

The room: shut the door, let people in, send them home, run the haze, spill a drink. Breathe on it: hold the cage, the grille or the breathe button. RESCUE: press it when it's failing, or once it's fallen. Turn a knob: drag it or tap either side of it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts a knob back. Nothing here uses your microphone. The patches step on by themselves until you touch something.

The bird over a slow dark groove, in the room above the panel. Listen plays the patch from its top, or from where you've got to if you've touched anything.

example patches

The real one reads the real room, through a carbon dioxide sensor and a gas sensor behind the grille, and a real printed bird falls off a real perch. A browser has neither, so here a small model of a room stands in for the air and for the sensors reading it late, and half an hour of a show goes by in a minute. The voice, the song book and everything the module does with what it reads are its engine as designed, running in your browser. The groove and the room you can hear are stand-ins too.

The bird

A bird about as long as your thumb's top joint, printed and painted, stands on a perch in half a brass cage, with the panel for a back wall. It doesn't move. It sings, and a lamp burns under it. It breathes what you're breathing, through the grille under the cage. When the air's gone bad enough the song stops, and for a while nothing happens at all. That silence is your warning. Then the catch lets go and it falls: it goes over beak first, swings under the perch and hangs there by its feet. Nothing carries it down. That's gravity, so a rack that's tipped right back on a flat table won't drop it.

The lamp: burns on the same air. It sinks as the air goes, and it's out when the bird falls.
RESCUE: the oxygen, four bottles by the button. Press it when it's failing and it pulls round for a while; once it's fallen, a press lifts it back. It's only spent when it's wanted. The cap glows when it is.
RESCUE (the jack): any gate does the same.
The cost: a fall takes the tune it was singing. It doesn't come back with it. Four bottles, then they're empty until it's had an hour of clean air.

The air

Two real sensors, two different harms. CO2 climbs slowly through a night as a crowd breathes: that shortens the song and thins out what it has the breath for. Gas is what's on the air: haze, spilled beer, solder, perfume, sweat: that gets in its throat, and it coughs and goes rough at once. Open a door and it starts to come back.

NERVE: how much it takes. Fully left, one breath does it. Noon, it fails in a packed room with the door shut. Fully right, no crowd alone will do it, and it only gets hoarse.
Your breath: lean in and breathe on the grille. The sensors feel the wet in it within a second or two, and it hits the bird at once.
AIR: a CV that takes over from the sensors, 0 to 8 V, for rehearsing a bad night in a good room.

The song

It isn't a sample and it isn't an oscillator. It's a model of a bird's voice box: two sides of a throat, each a pair of lips that air sets going, with a breath behind them and a windpipe in front. It sings the way a canary does, in rolls and trills and bells, a phrase of one sound over and over at up to thirty a second, with a small breath between each. Bad air doesn't filter that. It takes away the breath and the tension that made it, and what's left breaks up.

SONG: how much it sings. Fully left a chirp a bar. Noon a song of several phrases, then a rest. Fully right it never stops, and a bird that sings that hard breathes more of the room.
SIZE: its body, from a wren to a raven: pitch, speed and the length of its throat. Past three o'clock the voice cracks, and at full it's a croak.
TWO: its two sides. Fully left one voice. Turned up, a second note comes in on every other syllable, then both sing all the time. At full the second turns every sweep over, and two lines cross in one breath.
CLOCK: its phrases and trills snap to your clock.

Teaching it

WHISTLE and TEACH: a pitch and a gate, from any sequencer. It listens, and it keeps up to six tunes, with the power off too. With nothing in TEACH, WHISTLE is the root its own song sits on.
TAUGHT: fully left its own song, five notes with no third in them, and it keeps nothing you teach it. Turned up, more of its phrases are yours, ornamented, in pieces. Fully right it sings what you taught it, whole, in order.
It never holds a plain note: a short note's a chip, a middling one a slide, a long one a trill. It's your tune in its throat.

What comes out

BIRD: its voice.
ROOM: 0 to 8 V, a real measurement of how many people have been breathing in here and for how long. The length of the show is a modulation source.
GAS: 0 to 8 V, the gas reading, quick enough to catch a haze machine.
ALIVE: high while it's on its perch. Put a VCA on your whole mix.
DEAD: fires when it falls.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: 5 knobs, 1 lit button, a bird
Senses: the room's CO2 and what's on its air, through a grille

Inputs

CLOCK: clock, rising past 1 V
WHISTLE: 1 V/oct
TEACH: gate, rising past 1 V
AIR: CV, 0 to 8 V
RESCUE: gate, rising past 1 V

Outputs

BIRD: audio, ±5 V
ROOM, GAS: CV, 0 to 8 V
ALIVE: gate, 5 V
DEAD: trigger, 5 V