flatline

12 HP · envelope

An envelope with a heartbeat. Every gate is one beat of a heart trace: the hit, the tail, and a small swell just before the next beat is due. Stop the beats and it flatlines; SHOCK brings it back, and something comes back with it.

The FLATLINE panel: black, a starved man laid out on a table in gold dots, seen from above, his face under the name and his eyes dark. Across his chest a monitor of small square windows of bare circuit board, sixteen across and eight down, with the jacks RATE and BPM either side of it. The knobs RATE and TAIL on his shoulders and ARRHYTHMIA on his breastbone; under the monitor the jacks BEAT and SHOCK, the SHOCK button, OUT and PULSE, and CODE at the foot. flatline at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. SHOCK is a button to press. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

The beat, the monitor and every out are FLATLINE's own. The drums, the bass, the pad and the tone CODE opens are made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The heart, the monitor and every out here are FLATLINE's engine as it's designed, running in your browser. The drums, the voices, the shocks on the drop, the CV into RATE and the hand on RATE are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

The beat

Every gate is a beat in three parts. The hit is a sharp spike with a small dip under the line after it. The tail is a broad second swell. The bump before is a small swell placed just ahead of the next beat, timed from the gates, so it swells into the next hit; if that beat never comes, the bump was for nothing. The faster the beats come, the shorter the tail: it goes with the square root of the time between them, so it keeps up with the tempo and never smears.

BEAT: a gate in, a beat each.
RATE: with BEAT patched, beats a gate, from one every fourth gate to four a gate. Empty, it beats on its own, from once every four seconds to a racing 600 a minute.
RATE (the CV in): on its own, 1 V an octave; with BEAT patched, a step of beats a gate for every volt.
TAIL: from no tail at all, the hit alone, to a long second swell.
OUT: the beat. The line is 0 V, a hit 6.5 V, the dip down to -1 V.
PULSE: a trigger on every spike.
BPM: the heart rate as a CV, 1 V for every 60 a minute, 0 V while it's flat.

Flatline

Miss three beats and the trace runs flat: OUT sits at 0 V, CODE goes high, the monitor turns red and SHOCK glows. SHOCK is the paddles. The first beat back overshoots, bigger and sharper than the rest, and something comes back with it: every beat carries a ghost beat, louder the longer it was under, fading over about as many beats as it was gone. Gone long enough, two follow every beat.

SHOCK: the button, and a trigger in. With nothing in SHOCK, the first gate after a flatline is the shock.
CODE: a gate while the trace is flat.

A shock on a beating heart

Shocking a heart that's still beating is a gamble. Between beats it's an extra jolt of a beat. On the tail it throws the heart into fibrillation: OUT shivers in a fast, chaotic wobble, PULSE fires at random, and a few seconds later it goes flat unless it's shocked again.

Arrhythmia

ARRHYTHMIA: from a steady beat, to early beats (wide and odd, no bump before them, a long pause after), to beats that drop out or come twice, to an irregular heart with no bumps and a wandering line.