carnyx

20 HP · voice

A voice in the shape of an Iron Age war horn whose head you choose. Click HEAD to a boar, a serpent, a dragon, a stag or a wolf, and the horn's voice changes with it. Each is a physical model you play with V/OCT, GATE and BREATH, its head drawn in 3D on the module's own screen.

The Carnyx front panel: black, with two hands in gold halftone dots gripping the bronze tube of a war horn that rises up the middle into the screen, and rings of gold dots spreading out round the screen like the horn's blast. White labels: SIZE, HEAD, JAW and TONGUE down the sides with SHIFT, SWELL, SNAP and SPIT between them, TUNE and BLOW under the screen, then GATE, SHAPE, V/OCT, BREATH and OUT.

Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. HEAD clicks between the five heads, and the voice changes with it. Hold GATE down to blow, pluck or bow a note yourself.

OUT, with a riff played into V/OCT and GATE (and BREATH, for the stag), all made in the page.

example patches

The module's own firmware, compiled for your browser: the C that runs on its RP2350, the five animals' physical models and the screen they draw, built to WebAssembly unchanged. It makes OUT 32 samples at a time at 48 kHz, as the module's audio core does, and draws the screen about 20 times a second, as its second core does.

The animals

Five, all in one firmware, each a head on the horn: HEAD's five clicks pick one by hand, SHAPE by CV. Each is a physical model, not a sample, computed 48,000 times a second: lips that open once a period at exactly the V/OCT pitch and drive a bore, vocal folds that drive five formant resonators, or strings as delay loops, a bowed one correcting its own pitch by ear.

SIZE, JAW and TONGUE are the carnyx's knobs, and each animal reads them its own way, in sound and on the screen. Play one to hear a riff while SIZE turns, HEAD clicks through the other animals and back, then JAW and TONGUE turn, then SIZE and JAW together.

BOAR

The war horn's own voice: lips that open once a period at exactly the V/OCT pitch, driving a long bronze bore and out through the boar's open mouth. Its head is the boar found at Deskford in Scotland, which had a moving wooden tongue.

  • SIZE: a bigger horn and a longer bore. Whole harmonics ring clean; the settings between them growl.
  • HEAD: clicks through the other animals and back, each heard and seen in turn.
  • JAW: muffled with the jaw closed, blaring wide open.
  • TONGUE: the flapping tongue, from a flutter to a rattle.

Each note starts with a bark.

SERPENT

A hollow, breathy horn blown through a spiral bore. Its head is the ram-horned serpent the antlered god holds on the Gundestrup cauldron, where carnyx players march on another plate.

  • SIZE · whorls: how many turns the spiral has, and so the bore's length.
  • HEAD: clicks through the other animals and back, each heard and seen in turn.
  • JAW · hand: a hand pushed into the bell muffles the note and flattens it by up to a semitone.
  • TONGUE · crack: a cracked bore, a rough, unstable buzz.

DRAGON

A keening voice that runs from a sung note to a scream: vocal folds driving five formant resonators.

  • SIZE · vowel: oo, oh, ah, eh, ee.
  • HEAD: clicks through the other animals and back, each heard and seen in turn.
  • JAW · crush: drive, then the grit of an old sound chip, its sample rate locked to the pitch so the grit stays in tune.
  • TONGUE · wash: reverb, then echoes timed from GATE, fed back through a saturator.

Each gate scoops up into its note, a held note grows a vibrato, and blowing harder strains it.

STAG

Six plucked strings that ring on across each other and resonate in sympathy, its head a stag's.

  • SIZE · strings: gut (warm and short) to bronze wire (bright, long and shimmering).
  • HEAD: clicks through the other animals and back, each heard and seen in turn.
  • JAW · pluck: a fingertip at the middle (round, hollow) to a nail by the bridge (bright, twangy).
  • TONGUE · bray: pins the strings buzz against when they're played hard, clearing as the notes fade.

WOLF

A bowed string with two drone strings beside it, correcting its own pitch by ear, its head a snarling wolf's.

  • SIZE · bow: bowed by the fingerboard (soft, round) or toward the bridge (edgy, nasal).
  • HEAD: clicks through the other animals and back, each heard and seen in turn.
  • JAW · drones: the melody alone, then drones on the home key and its fifth.
  • TONGUE · rosin: from a smooth bow to a gritty, raucous one.

Each gate turns the bow round for a new stroke.

The screen

A 2.7-inch Sharp memory LCD, run dark. The horn on the panel runs on into it: the screen draws the head you've picked on the same tube, which always meets the panel's at the glass's edge, in 3D and rebuilt from the knobs about 20 times a second. At rest the head faces you, its sound rings round it. Turn a knob and the head turns on the pole to show you what's changing, and a caption says what that knob does on this animal; SIZE grows the head.

The panel

The carnyx was the Celts' war horn: a bronze tube held upright, taller than the player, its mouth an animal's head high above the crowd. On the panel two hands grip it and hold it up into the screen, where its head is drawn, and its blast rings out round the glass across the panel, in 1,880 dots of bare gold. Every part has its twin across the middle, knob for knob and jack for jack.

Inside

The Carnyx front panel, with its knobs and jacks.

Drag to look around. Lift the panel to see the screen on its header; turn it round for the RP2350 on the back.

Specs

Format

Standard
Eurorack, 3U
Width
20 HP (101.3 × 128.5 mm)
Panel
FR4, black mask, bare gold (ENIG) art, white labels
Screen
2.7″ Sharp memory LCD, 400 × 240, run dark, about 20 frames a second
Controls
5 knobs (SIZE, JAW, TONGUE, TUNE, BLOW) and HEAD, a five-position switch
Power
About 90 mA on +12 V, 10 mA on −12 V

I/O

Pitch in
V/OCT, −2 to +8 V
Gate in
GATE, over 1.4 V
CV in
BREATH, 0 to 8 V; SHAPE, 0 to 5 V; SHIFT, SWELL, SNAP, SPIT, ±5 V
Audio out
OUT, ±5 V
USB
USB-C, for firmware

Engine

Brain
RP2350 at 153.6 MHz: one core makes the sound, the other draws the screen
Audio
48 kHz into a PCM5102A DAC
Animals
5: boar, serpent, dragon, stag and wolf, each a head on the horn and its own voice
Pitch
Within 0.13 cents from 65 Hz to 1 kHz on the boar, serpent, stag and wolf; the dragon wavers by design, a vibrato and a jitter
Firmware
One, with every voice: drag a .uf2 file onto the module

Nothing's for sale yet.

The boards are drawn in KiCad and the firmware builds, but no Carnyx has been built yet. Every sound and every screen on this page comes from the firmware: on the stage, compiled for your browser; in the voices' recordings, running in its desktop simulator.

hello@daylightnoise.com