nearer

How far

• DISTANCE, the big knob: where it stands. Fully right, thirty metres off. Noon, a couple of metres. Fully left, as close as WHISPER lets it. Its jack adds to the knob, 5 V the whole way.
• It isn't a reverb. As it nears, the direct sound rises by 1/r while the room stays where it was, the treble comes back as the air thins, the first reflections close in, the stereo widens from a dot to the whole room. Moved, it bends in pitch, a little, as anything that moves does.
• ROOM: the size of the space, a cupboard to eighty metres of stone with seven seconds of tail. Past the far wall of a small room you hear it through the wall. Its jack adds to the knob.
• WHISPER: how close closest is. Fully left, thirty centimetres. By noon, three, round at one ear, the bass swelling and a whisper's air in it. Up from there, its pitch goes to breath.

When it's quiet

• It never moves while you can hear it. It waits for a gap: the sound stops for longer than the spaces in what you're playing, so a groove's own rests don't count.
• COME: how far a gap brings it in. Fully left it stays. Noon, a quarter of the way. Fully right, one gap and it's there.
• When it arrives it stays at your ear until the next gap. Then it's gone, the window is dark for a moment, and it starts again from where DISTANCE stands.
• QUIET: a gate. Patched, each gate counts as a gap and it stops listening for them, so a sequencer can bring it in over a track that never stops.

The window

• Three clear sheets, one behind the other, thirteen millimetres front to back, each engraved with the same thing at its own size and lit from its own edge. Unlit, there's nothing there.
• The sheets stand a decade apart: the back one thirty metres, the middle three, the front thirty centimetres. Between them, both are faintly lit, at two depths at once.
• It's real depth: move your head and they slide over each other.
• The window burns while there's sound and goes black in a gap. So you never see it move. It's just nearer, every time the light comes back.

A thumb on the glass

• In front of the three sheets is one plain pane, the one you touch. An invisible light runs through it from side to side, shut inside the pane until something touches it, and a thumb takes some of it. That's how the glass feels you, with nothing in the view.
• Press and slide: high up it goes back down the room, low down it comes in, with a real bend in the pitch as you throw it. Lift off and it stays where you left it.
• A quick tap, as you'd tap on a tank, and it's gone back to where DISTANCE stands. SHOO is a gate that does the same.

In the glass

• There's one more place past the front sheet. The window goes dark, because it isn't behind the glass any more.
• The pane is a speaker. As WHISPER comes up, the close voice goes into the pane itself and speaks from the panel, in your room, thin and small and quite real, the moment after your track goes quiet.
• At full it has left your speakers altogether. Nothing on LEFT and RIGHT: only the glass.

What comes out

• LEFT and RIGHT: the sound where it stands.
• GLASS: a small microphone behind the pane: what the pane itself says, your thumb on it, your taps. Patch it in to record the glass, or to hear it in headphones.
• WHERE: a CV, 0 V far off to 5 V at your ear.
• ARRIVED: a gate, high while it's at your ear.
• STEP: a gate each time it comes a step nearer. Put a footstep on it.

Specs