logogram

The ring

• A ring of 128 masses on springs, moving at the speed of a hand, and a head going round it hundreds of times a second. What the head reads is the wave. Nothing in the timbre is a filter or an LFO: it's a thing being struck and settling.
• At rest it's a stroke that starts thick and thins all the way round, which is a warm saw. The light is the wave: where the ring is high the stroke swells, where it's low it's a hairline.
• Tap the ring and two ripples run away from your finger, meet on the far side and come back. Press and stay and your finger holds that point still, a node, and the ripples break on it. Drag round it at the ripple's own speed and each push lands on the last, and it builds, like a wet finger on a glass.
• Left alone it's never quite still: a small drop falls on it every few seconds, until something's in STRIKE.
• PITCH, the big knob: how fast the head goes round. V/OCT adds to it, ten octaves.

How it moves

• TENSION: how fast the ring ripples. Fully left a ripple crawls round in thirteen seconds. At noon it takes a second. Full, the ring ripples at audio speed and shrieks: its motion stops being a change of timbre and becomes notes of its own.
• DAMP: how long it rings. Fully left a strike rings for ever. Fully right it's too thick to ring at all: a hit stays as a dent and creeps out along the ring, like a blot in wet paper.

How it's read

• CHORD: the head's path. Fully left it follows the circle. Up, it cuts across the ring in straight lines, corner to corner, at the same speed. The corners are a star, and a star reads as an interval: an octave, a sixth, a fifth, a fourth, a third. One head, two notes. It rests on those stops and slides between them.
• SOONER: how far ahead of your ears the ring runs, up to one whole gap between strikes. A strike goes in now and lands later, and before it lands the ripples it will make run backwards and close on the place it will fall. On a steady beat, at full, every strike lands on the next. Stop the beat and it lands on nothing.

Ink

• INK, the knob: how hard what comes in writes on the ring. The head writes as it reads, so your sound takes the note and rings on it, and spreads along the ring. Full and your audio simply is the wave.
• With nothing in the jack the head writes its own reading back, folded, every lap. It hardens, then it tears.

What goes in

• V/OCT: 1 V an octave.
• STRIKE: a rising edge strikes the ring, as hard as the voltage. Unpatched, each new note at V/OCT strikes it.
• WHERE: which point on the ring is struck, 5 V the whole way round. Unpatched, where you last touched it.
• INK: audio.
• The TENSION, CHORD and SOONER jacks add to their knobs, 5 V the whole way round.

What comes out

• READ: what the head reads.
• HALF: a second head at half the speed, on only the ring's slow shapes: an octave down and soft, with the same ripples in it.
• RIPPLE: the ring itself as a slow CV, at the point opposite the last blow, so a strike reaches it half a lap later. With SOONER up it's ahead of what you hear.
• STRUCK: a gate as each strike lands. Hit a drum with it and the wave knows the drum before it comes.

Inside

Drag it or use the arrow keys to turn it; click it to take it apart.

Flip the panel

Specs