pinhole

the room, upside down

20 HP

A real lens looks out of the panel and throws what it sees onto a small round glass: a real image, no pixels, in the room's own colours. Behind the same lens a sensor reads the same picture, and one line of it is your wave. A blank wall is a sine. Everyone who walks past is in the sound.

Your camera is off until you press that. Nothing's recorded or sent, and it stays on this page.

The PINHOLE panel: black, with an old room in gold dots hung upside down: damask walls, lit doors down both sides, and a chandelier standing up from the ceiling at the foot. Its two round windows are a lens in a knurled focus ring and a round glass with a small room on it, upside down. Between them a ruler of small lights; under them eight perforations. ROW is the big knob, with SMEAR, CONTRAST, TUNE, SPREAD and FILM round it, a lit button SHUTTER, and ten jacks.

Hold your hand up to it: drag on the glass. Cover the lens: hold it. Focus: turn the ring round the lens as you would a knob. SHUTTER: press it to hold a picture and keep it. 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 a knob back. The patches step on by themselves until you touch something.

A slow phrase into STOP, with the module's wave as the voice. Listen plays the patch from its top, or from where you've got to if you've touched anything.

the two waves

what VIDEO sends

example patches

The real one has a real lens and a real image on real glass, as bright as the room and no brighter. A browser has neither, so here a photograph of a small room stands in, with a lamp, someone walking through and a model of the sensor's grain, or your own webcam if you ask. The line across the glass is the page's: the module marks it on the ruler beside the glass. The engine that turns a line into a wave, the exposure, the roll and everything else the module does with the picture are as designed, running in your browser. The tune and the drums are stand-ins.

The glass

It's the oldest optical trick there is. Light from the room comes in through a lens, turns twice behind the panel and lands on a small dark glass: a real picture, no pixels, soft and dim and in colour. It's upside down, and it moves the way you move. It's there with the power off. It's only ever as bright as the room: in a lit room you'll want to lean in, and at a dark show what you'll see on it is the lit stage, not the crowd. Behind the same lens a small grey sensor reads the same picture, sixty times a second.

Nothing is kept but what SHUTTER keeps, eight small grey pictures, and it has no network: nothing it sees leaves the module except through its jacks.

FOCUS: the ring round the lens, a real one. It's the filter. Turn it and the glass goes soft and the top of the sound goes with it, with the hollow, uneven look a lens's blur has.
The lens: cover it and the picture's black, and you get a sine.

The wave

The brightness along one line of the picture is one cycle of an oscillator. The line's faded to nothing at both ends, so it closes into a loop, and that means anything flat is a sine: a blank wall, a dark room, a white sheet. Everything else in the room is a dent in that sine. A person against a bright window is a pulse wave as wide as they are, and when they move, it sweeps. You hear yourself.

ROW: which line. Every row of the picture is a wave in a bank that's new sixty times a second. The ruler beside the glass shows where you are.
ROW (the jack): moves the line.
CONTRAST: how hard the picture's lit. Fully left it's soft, nearly a sine. Near noon, the room as it is. By three o'clock every edge is a hard step, and past that the steps fold over and over.
SPREAD: fully left, one line in both ears. Turned up, your left ear reads a line above ROW and your right a line below it, and each is two read heads drifting apart.

Exposure and film

SMEAR: the exposure. At zero every flicker's in the sound. At full it's three minutes of the room averaged, and people walking through vanish from the wave as they would from an old photograph, though the glass still shows them. In a dark room it gathers light, and the grain settles.
SHUTTER: press and the picture's held for as long as you hold it, and kept on the roll, the next of eight, for good. A press past the eighth goes over the first as a double exposure: light only adds. Hold it for three seconds for a new roll.
SHUTTER (the jack): any gate does the same.
FILM: fully left, the room live. Turned up it moves along the roll, frame to frame, crossfading. The glass goes on showing the room as it is: you're hearing it as it was. Its jack does the same. The eight perforations show the roll.

Pitch

STOP: 1 V/oct. A stop's a doubling, as an octave is. It tracks like any other voice.
TUNE: two and a half octaves either way.
SHAKE: audio in. It shakes the read head along the line, so anything you patch here frequency-modulates the room.

What comes out

LEFT, RIGHT: the voice.
VIDEO: composite for a real tube, black and white. One column of the room a frame, sliding across, so people smear into long sideways ghosts. With SMEAR turned up the screen holds the room's last half minute. Point the lens at the tube and it reads its own picture.
BRIGHT: the room's light as a CV, a volt a stop, so twice the light into STOP is an octave up.
MOVED: fires when something moves.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: 6 knobs, 1 focus ring, 1 lit button
Sees: the room, through a lens

Inputs

STOP: 1 V/oct
SHAKE: audio, ±5 V
ROW, FILM: CV, ±5 V
SHUTTER: gate, rising past 1 V

Outputs

LEFT, RIGHT: audio, ±5 V
VIDEO: composite, 320 x 240, NTSC or PAL, on a 3.5 mm jack
BRIGHT: CV, 0 to 8 V, a volt a stop
MOVED: trigger, 5 V