fireflies: 20 HP, sixty fireflies that find each other, by daylight noise

Finding each other

Each firefly keeps its own time and flashes when it runs out. Every flash nudges the ones that see it, the near ones most: a little later if they've just flashed, a little sooner if they were about to. That's all it takes. Neighbours fall in step first, little clusters flashing together; then the clusters pull each other in, until the whole swarm flashes as one, as the real ones do in the Great Smoky Mountains. None keeps perfect time, so left alone they drift apart again.

COUPLING: how hard they pull. At zero, a shimmer forever; at noon, clusters in about ten seconds and one in under a minute; full, one within a few flashes.

COUPLING CV: ±5 V adds or takes away half the knob. An LFO into it and the swarm breathes.

RATE: how often each one flashes, from every four seconds to eight times a second. As one, it's the tempo.

SPREAD: how different each one's own pace is. Up, the swarm breaks into clusters at their own tempos; full, it never comes together.

The chimes

Every flash rings its firefly's note, a struck glass bell, pitched by its height on the panel and panned by where it sits, left to right. At random they're a shimmer of single bells; in clusters, fragments of chords; as one, a single chord on a clock. Sixty at once are fuller and a little louder than the shimmer, never sixty times as loud.

TONE: the notes the heights are tuned to, in steps: the root alone, root and fifth, a minor triad, the minor pentatonic at noon, the minor scale, all twelve notes.

V/OCT: the root, 1 V an octave. It moves the whole chord.

GLOW: how long each flash lasts, light and sound together: a dry tick and a blink, up to a bell that rings for seconds, so a synced swarm smears into one held chord.

Scare and lantern

Press SCARE and the scare rises from the button up through the swarm in half a second. Each firefly it reaches startles, flashes once, bright, hides in the dark a moment and comes back at random. Everything they'd found is gone, and they start finding each other again.

Patch a clock into LANTERN and every beat is a flash they all see, brighter than all of them together. They gather round it, take its tempo and flash on its beat; a clock twice their pace and they flash on every other one. The lantern itself makes no sound and no light.

SCARE: the button. TRIG: a trigger does the same.

LANTERN: a clock in. COUPLING still sets how hard they follow it.

What comes out

PULSE fires whenever half the swarm flashes at once: nothing at random, the odd one in clusters, a steady clock once they're one. Patch it to a drum machine and the beat grows out of the shimmer.

PULSE: a trigger on the swarm's flash. Its label glows with it.

SYNC: how together they are, about 1 V at random up to 8 V as one.

FLY 1 and FLY 2: a trigger at every flash of the two ringed strays, each its own clock until the swarm takes it in.

OUT L and OUT R: the chimes, the panel's width the stereo.

The panel

Twenty HP, every part on the line's staggered grid and mirrored about the middle, except the swarm: sixty little oval windows of bare circuit board, each with an LED behind it, rising up the middle, a few strays out among the parts. A swarm isn't symmetrical. The art is a jar.

V/OCT and COUPLING CV at the top corners; RATE, TONE and SPREAD, GLOW down the edges.

PULSE and SYNC beside the swarm; COUPLING under it, TRIG and LANTERN either side, SCARE at the foot.

FLY 1, FLY 2, OUT L and OUT R at the bottom corners.