many by daylight noise

The hold

MANY is a pitch shifter. Every voice is the host itself, pitched, sounding with it at once; what's different is that they grow. While the host sounds the hold deepens and they come in one by one, the low one first, then the whisper, the fifth, the backwards one, the high one and the crowd, each louder and stranger as it deepens. Past halfway the host fades under them. At the end it's gone, and it stays gone until COMPEL.

HOLD, the big knob: how fast they take over. Fully left they barely stir, six minutes of sound to take the host; at noon about half a minute; fully right a single bar. While the host is quiet the hold loosens at half the speed it grew.

HOLD, the jack: its CV, added to the knob.

HOST: the host in, mono: a voice, a lead, a pad, a loop.

The voices

BELOW: how low and thick the deepest voice is. Fully left one voice an octave down; at noon three of them, a second octave coming in under; fully right two octaves down, five voices, growling.

WRONG: how sour the intervals are. Fully left a fifth and an octave over, a fourth under; turned up they slide to a tritone, a major seventh and a minor ninth, and at full the fifth is a semitone's rub and the crowd a cluster. The further it's turned and the deeper the hold, the more every voice drifts off pitch.

WRONG, the jack: its CV, added to the knob.

BACKWARDS: how much of it sings backwards. A third of the way round, the backwards one has turned; from halfway the others follow, until at full every voice sings the line backwards in long syllables.

WHISPER: how much of it is breath. Fully left the whisper is silent; at noon it breathes the host's words a little above it; past noon the other voices turn to breath too, every one of them at full.

The glass lights as the voices come in, the high ones at the top and the low at the foot, each side as it's panned, spreading outward as the hold deepens; its rim of whole glass lights with the host and goes dark as it's taken.

Compel

COMPEL, a lit button and its gate: throws them out. Every voice shudders and is gone in three tenths of a second, the host shakes and comes back whole, and the hold can't grow again for a rest, a quarter of HOLD's time. The cap flashes, then glows through the rest.

Clock it and they're thrown out on the bar; patch TAKEN into it and the host throws them out every time they win.

What comes out

LEFT, RIGHT: the mix, the host in the middle and the voices spread round it, wider as the hold deepens.

VOICES: the voices alone.

HOST: what's left of the host: whole, then fading, then nothing.

DEPTH: how deep the hold is, 0 to 8 V.

TAKEN: a gate, high while the host is gone.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: a big knob, 4 knobs, a lit button

Inputs

HOST: audio, ±5 V, mono
COMPEL: gate, a rising edge past 1 V
HOLD, WRONG: CV, added to their knobs, 5 V the whole way

Outputs

LEFT, RIGHT: audio, the mix
VOICES, HOST: audio, mono
DEPTH: CV, 0 to 8 V
TAKEN: gate, 5 V