feast

the top eats first

20 HP

A sound let down a shaft through six floors. Each floor takes the strongest parts left on it and leaves the rest for the floor below, a moment later: the top gets the clearest tone, the bottom the crumbs, the breath and the tails.

The FEAST panel: black, with gold dots of a square concrete shaft seen from straight above, floor under floor, and six nested square rings of bare circuit board round the big GREED knob, one a floor, the top floor's outermost. TABLE in at the top of the middle, the MONTH and KEEP jacks in the top corners with their buttons under them, the DESCENT and TASTE jacks over the shaft and their knobs either side of it, the six outs round the foot, KNIFE, FORK, SPOON, BOWL, CUP and HANDS, each with a small round window beside it, and GREED's jack at the foot. feast at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

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 it back. MONTH and KEEP are buttons: press MONTH; hold KEEP down. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

Dark music in G minor into TABLE, and each of the six outs through an effect of its own: KNIFE dry in the middle, FORK an echo, SPOON crushed, BOWL a ringing comb, CUP a sweep, HANDS a long hall. Listen plays the patch from its top.

example patches

Everything FEAST does here is its engine as designed, running in your browser. The music and the six effects are a stand-in rack.

The floors

TABLE goes in at the top. FEAST looks at it every ten milliseconds and cuts what it hears into its parts, each a peak of the spectrum, then ranks them, the strongest first. The top floor takes the best of them, the next floor the next best, and so on down; the bottom floor gets whatever's left. Nothing is lost: line the six outs up again and they add back to the sound that went in. The square rings round GREED are the floors, the top one outermost, each lit by how much its floor is eating.

GREED, the big knob: how much each floor takes. Fully left nobody eats, and the whole table reaches the bottom untouched. At noon the top floor takes the single strongest part, the next floor the next two or three, and each floor below takes more of what's left. At full the top floor eats everything of note, the next two get scraps and the bottom three starve.
GREED, the jack: its CV, added to the knob.

Down the shaft

DESCENT: how long the table takes from one floor to the next. Fully left every floor eats at once; at noon 90 ms a floor; at full a second a floor, five to reach the bottom. Turned while it plays, the lower floors bend like tape.
TASTE: what the floors think is best. At noon the loudest. Turned right, the freshest: whatever's newest takes the top floors, and what's rung longest sinks. Turned left, the stalest: what's been there longest, or is dying away, rises, and the body of the sound is sent down to the bottom.
DESCENT and TASTE, the jacks: their CVs, added to the knobs.

The month and the keep

MONTH, a button and its trigger: a new month. All six who eat wake up on a different floor, so every out moves to another floor's share in a few milliseconds. Nothing is lost; patch a clock and the arrangement changes every bar.
KEEP, a lit button and its gate: while it's held, nobody may touch the table. What plays goes down every floor whole and comes out of the bottom floor untouched, sample for sample. The cap stays lit until it gets there.

What comes out

Six outs, one for each who eats, named for what they eat with. At first KNIFE is on the top floor and HANDS on the bottom, in their order down the panel; each month moves them. The small light beside each out is its plate: how much that one is eating now.

KNIFE, FORK, SPOON, BOWL, CUP, HANDS: what each one ate, as audio. Patch them to six effects, or to six places in a mix.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: a big knob, 2 knobs, 2 buttons (one lit)

Inputs

TABLE: audio, ±5 V
CVs: GREED, DESCENT, TASTE: added to the knobs, 5 V the whole way
MONTH: trigger, rising past 1 V
KEEP: gate, kept while high

Outputs

The six: KNIFE, FORK, SPOON, BOWL, CUP, HANDS: audio, ±5 V; added together they're TABLE, 43 ms late on the top floor