quick

it keeps time with you

20 HP

Put a finger on the pad. Red light goes through it and you can see your own fingertip glow, and that light reads your pulse. Now your rack runs on your blood. Let go and it goes on without you, weaker and further apart, until it stops. Or keep it, and it'll run on your heart when you're not there.

The QUICK panel: black, with gold dots of an old ribcage and a spine, a real heart in the middle of it, and two round pads low down, either side of the spine.

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. Give it a pulse: find the one in your wrist or your neck and tap it on a pad, and from the fourth tap the rack is running on you. Or press and hold a pad and a stand-in heart starts. Let go and it sinks. Tab to a pad: Space is your finger. The patches step on by themselves until you touch something.

A stand-in heart on the left pad, and a dark rack stepping on it. Your taps and your finger work before and after. Listen plays the patch from its top.

example patches

The page can't feel your finger, so it asks you for your pulse, or it holds a stand-in: a model of one heart, seeded, with a person's wander. On the module it's your blood, read through your skin by light. Everything else here is its engine as designed, running in your browser. The band is a stand-in rack. Nothing you tap leaves this page, and what you keep goes when you close it.

The pads

Two round pads, a side each. A ring of red light under a fingertip, and a photodiode in the middle reading what comes back through your skin. It's the same light you can see glowing in your finger: there's no electrical contact with you at all.

The pulse in a finger comes about a fifth of a second after your heart, too late to play on. So the module doesn't react. For a few beats it can only answer, and then it has you: it works out when your next beat is due from the last few, and it's there as it lands, corrected a little each time. A heart that moves on the pad is coasted over until the reading comes back. Two people, one on each pad, get a heart each.

The clock

A resting heart speeds up as you breathe in and slows as you breathe out. That's the instrument: the most human swing a rack has had. Nervous on stage, the set speeds up by itself. Run up the stairs and it's techno.

BREATH, the big knob: how much of your wander reaches the clock. Fully left, a grid at your slow mean. At full, your wander as it came: a live finger's early beats are stepped over, and a kept heart plays them all.
TIMES: an eight-stop switch, clocks a beat. Every other beat, then one, two, three, four, six, eight and sixteen. A heart at 62 is a hat at 248.
PACE: a clock in. The tempo's the clock's now, and the heart's the lean on it: every beat pushed and pulled as it came, and it never leaves the grid.

Its heart

BODY: the module's own voice, low and doubled. Fully left it's a felt tap. At full it's a chest full, with nothing else near it. A second heart sits a third above the first.
VEIN: audio in, anything you like. It goes through with your blood in it.
DEEP: how far. Fully left it's straight through. At full it's shut in and dark between beats, and each pulse opens it. Put the whole rack through it and the rack goes when the heart goes.

Let go

Take your finger off and it keeps your heart going without you, from what it remembers. It slows, weakens, and stops.

SINK: how long it lasts. Fully left it's gone in a few bars. At full, an hour. Touch a pad and it picks you up.
STILL: a gate. High from the last beat until a heart comes back: the last thing it does.

Keep

It keeps people. A minute of a heart, every interval as it came, for good, and the rack can run on it: your partner's, your child's, someone who's gone. Their breath is in it too. It comes back note for note, and being stored it's more exact than you are: it never has to guess.

WHOSE: an eight-stop switch. The first stop is nobody and the other seven are places, each with a small light if someone's there. Turn to someone and they come in on the right. Turn away and they sink. A finger on the right pad takes over.
KEEP: lit. Press it and the last minute of the heart you last touched goes in that place, and it starts up beside you. A place with someone in it takes three seconds' hold, so nobody's lost to a slip.

What comes out

ARTERY: its voice, and VEIN.
CLOCK: TIMES to the beat, as BREATH says. It follows the left heart if there is one, or the right.
MINE: a gate on each beat of the left heart. YOURS: the same for the right. Those two are always the hearts as they are, whatever BREATH says.
OURS: a gate when the two land together. Nobody plays it. It's the rhythm between two people.
PULSE: the wave of the blood itself as a CV, its sharp rise and its little second bump. With two hearts, both.
LUNGS: your breathing, found in the wander of your heart. The slowest CV you'll ever make, and it's on a kept heart too.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: 2 finger pads, 3 knobs, 1 big knob, 2 eight-stop switches, 1 lit button
Reads: your pulse through a fingertip, by red and infrared light, with no electrical contact

Inputs

VEIN: audio
PACE: clock

Outputs

ARTERY: audio
CLOCK, STILL: gate, 5 V
Gates: MINE, YOURS, OURS, 5 V
PULSE, LUNGS: CV, 0 to 8 V