myxomatosis

a loop that catches something

20 HP

It cuts a bar into sixteen slices, the sixteen rabbits. Let a sickness loose on one and it spreads, made of that slice's sound. The sick swell, go blind, then die or pull through, and the survivors breed into the gaps until the bar grows back as something else.

The MYXOMATOSIS panel: black, with a rabbit's skull in gold dots seen from above, its crown under the name, its empty eye sockets round two of the knobs and its long snout down the middle to its teeth. Down the middle, in single file, sixteen small rabbits' heads of bare circuit board. White labels: IN, CATCH, VIRULENCE, SPREAD and OUT down the left edge, CLOCK, RELEASE, MOSQUITOES, DEATH and CASES down the right; the buttons CATCH and RELEASE and the knobs VIRULENCE, MOSQUITOES, SYMPTOMS, SEASON, RESISTANCE and LITTER either side of the rabbits. myxomatosis 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. CATCH and RELEASE are buttons to press. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is the rack through MYXOMATOSIS. The drums, the voice, the bass and the pad are made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The rabbits, the readout and the sound here are MYXOMATOSIS's engine as it's designed, running in your browser: every bite, every death, every kitten. The drums, the voice, the bass and the pad are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

The warren

Press CATCH and it takes the next bar from IN, cuts it into sixteenths and plays them round and round: the sixteen rabbits down the middle of the panel, top to bottom, the way the bar plays. The one playing is the bright one. A new catch starts a new warren, well, with no plague.

CATCH: the button, or a gate at its jack. It takes the bar from the next downbeat; while it does, OUT is IN.
CLOCK: quarter notes, four to a bar. Unpatched, it keeps the last tempo (120 BPM to begin with).
IN and OUT: the loop to catch, and the bar it's become.

The plague

Press RELEASE and the rabbit playing catches a fresh strain made of its own sound. It bites its way down the bar, and now and then jumps anywhere. Every rabbit it catches turns into a copy of that first slice, a little changed at every jump: up or down in pitch, backwards, stuttering. The strain that kills slowest spreads furthest, so the plague grows milder by itself, as the real one did after it was let loose on Australia's rabbits in 1950.

RELEASE: the button, or a trigger at its jack. The rabbit playing catches it; if that one's dead or immune, the next one down.
VIRULENCE: how deadly. Fully down, the sick only swell and everyone pulls through. Fully up, a rabbit it catches is dead within a beat, and it burns out with its hosts.
MOSQUITOES: how fast it spreads. Fully down, it never leaves the rabbit it started in.
SEASON: how long a year is, from two bars to sixty-four. In summer it spreads, in winter it nearly stops, and each spring the immune hand their places to kittens that can catch it. Fully up, endless summer.
Both knobs have a CV jack under them, 5 V half the knob's travel.

The sick

A sick rabbit glows red while it swells, then white as it goes blind. Then it dies, and its sixteenth goes silent, or it pulls through, immune, its own sound again, pale gold.

SYMPTOMS: how sick sounds. Fully down, the sick sound like themselves until they die. Turned up, the strain's sound takes them over and they sag into a fuzz, then go blind into hiss. Fully up, the white-out: nothing left but hiss in the shape of the hits.

The survivors

A dead rabbit's place fills with a kitten of the nearest living rabbit above it, playing its parent's slice. After a wave the bar is a new rhythm, made of what lived.

LITTER: how soon the gaps fill. Fully down, never: the plague eats the bar to silence.
RESISTANCE: how much of a survivor's toughness its kittens get. Fully down, none: they catch it as easily as ever. Fully up, after one wave the new bar holds.

What comes out

SPREAD: a trigger every sixteenth a rabbit catches it.
DEATH: a trigger every sixteenth a rabbit dies.
CASES: half a volt for every sick rabbit, 0 to 8 V: the epidemic's curve.