mayfly

it only lives once

20 HP

A voice that is a living circuit, wired at random when it's born. It follows what you play the way an animal follows, chirping, throbbing, swooping, and it ages as it lives: simple and bright, then rich and strange, then old, drifting and coughing. Then it dies. Dead is dead, until BIRTH wires another.

The MAYFLY panel: black, a mayfly seen from above in gold, lying on still water, its wings spread from edge to edge and its two long tails trailing to where ripples run out across the panel to the foot. Its body and wings are windows of bare circuit board, the thorax, ten segments and the tip, and the panes of its wings between their veins. NERVE and SPAN on the wing tips, LURE and BIRTH in under them, STRAIN's jack and SHOCK, NERVE's and SPAN's jacks, the big STRAIN knob under the body, the EGG and SHOCK buttons either side of the lit BIRTH button, PULSE and LIFE over SONG and DEAD at the outside. mayfly 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. BIRTH, EGG and SHOCK are buttons: BIRTH wires a new one, EGG lays, SHOCK jolts it. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

A rack round MAYFLY: a slow dark line in D minor into LURE over a heavy, sparse beat. Listen plays the patch from its top.

example patches

Everything MAYFLY does here is its engine as designed, running in your browser, sixty times faster than the module lives: two hours there is two minutes here. The line, the beat and the room are a stand-in rack.

One life

Each one is wired at random when it's born: five oscillators bending each other, saturating, ringing off one another, with a breath and a throb of their own. No two are the same. Young, its wiring is barely awake; grown, it's rich and strange; old, it drifts flat, darkens, coughs and crackles, and its heart skips. Then a last cry, a falling chirp, a thump, and silence. It keeps its age with the power off, so switching off doesn't save it.

BIRTH, a lit button and its trigger: wire a new one. If one is alive it's killed first, a short death, and the new one is born in the silence after it. The cap glows while nothing is alive.
SPAN, a knob and its CV: how long it's given. Two minutes fully left, two hours at noon, a day fully right. Turned while it lives, what's left stretches or shrinks; it never grows younger.
EGG, a button: it lays, for a tenth of its life. The tip of its body glows, even after it dies, and the next one born hatches from it: not the same one, but it has its parent's register, breath and throat and most of the rest, so you hear it in the next, and in the one after. Press it on a good one.
The body: its life on the panel. The thorax beats with its heart; the ten segments go out from the tail as it ages, and gutter when it's old.
The wings: lit low while it lives, brighter as it's strained. A chirp runs out along them, a twitch flicks a pane, and as it ages each pane tears for good, each creature in its own order.

Playing it

LURE: the pitch it follows, a volt an octave. It comes to each note late, overshoots and settles, in a register of its own, and slower and flatter as it ages.
STRAIN, the big knob: how hard it's driven. It purrs fully left, sings at noon and screams at full. The harder it's pushed, the faster it burns: a quarter as fast fully left, sixty times as fast at full.
STRAIN, the jack: its CV, added to the knob.
NERVE, a knob and its CV: how twitchy it is. Steady fully left; turned up it twitches, jerking away and springing back; at full it convulses, and that wears it out too.
SHOCK, a button and its trigger: a jolt. It cries out, and loses three hundredths of its life to each one.

What comes out

SONG: its voice. Silent while it's dead.
PULSE: a trigger at each heartbeat, quicker when it's strained, slower and skipping when it's old.
LIFE: what's left of its life, 8 V newborn falling to 0 V dead.
DEAD: a gate, high from its thump until the next birth.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: a big knob, 2 knobs, a lit button, 2 buttons

Inputs

LURE: V/OCT, ±5 V
STRAIN, NERVE: CVs, added to their knobs, 5 V the whole way
SPAN: CV, the same
BIRTH, SHOCK: triggers, rising past 1 V

Outputs

SONG: audio, about ±5 V
PULSE: trigger, 0/5 V, 10 ms
LIFE: CV, 8 to 0 V
DEAD: gate, 0/5 V