regress by daylight noise

The REGRESS panel: black, with a dark tiled wall in gold dots, a heavy round iron frame round a real mirror in the middle, and a basin and two taps at the foot. BREAK the button at the top with a CLOCK jack and a BREAK jack in the corners, DISTANCE and DISOBEY above the mirror, DARKEN and SMALLER beside its shoulders, a DISTANCE jack and CALL at its sides, SAY and a DEPTH jack below them, FAR and CAME out under the mirror, LEFT and RIGHT out at the corners of the foot, DEPTH the big knob between them. regress 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. Push the mirror: press anywhere on it and hold, or tab to it and use the arrow keys and Enter. In the middle the gap closes; at the edge the tunnel bends that way. BREAK is a button: press it. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is a rack played through REGRESS: a word, a pluck, a rimshot or a chord into SAY, and sometimes a groove beside it. All made in the page.

example patches

The echoes, the mirror's rings and how it moves, and the one that comes are REGRESS's engine as designed, running in your browser, the rings from the mirror's own sums; what goes into SAY stands in for a rack. Its memory is 16 seconds here, where the module's is 30.

The mirror

A ring of LEDs hides behind the rim, facing a second mirror: every ring you see is a reflection, one for each round trip of the light, and there's one repeat for each.
Each reflection is darker than the last by the same step, so the ring's brightness sets how many show. It's set to show as many as there are repeats you can hear.
The rim floats. Press the middle and the gap really closes: the delay shortens by up to a fifth, every repeat bending further than the last, like a thumb on a tape reel.
Lean on one side and the mirrors make a wedge: the tunnel bends round towards your thumb. Left or right, the deep repeats swing that way and leave the stereo as their rings leave the glass. Up or down, the tail's pitch leans up or down.

The echoes

DEPTH, the big knob: every repeat is the last one times this. Noon is seven repeats; full never dies. SAY always passes, so the bottom of the knob is the mix.
DISTANCE: a repeat's time, 8 ms to 2 seconds. Fully left the tunnel is a ringing metal pipe. Turned, it glides, and the pitch goes with it.
CLOCK: patched, DISTANCE takes divisions of the beat, from a 32nd to a bar, a dotted eighth at noon.
DARKEN: what each repeat loses. Bright and clean fully left, dark at noon; at full every pass falls under 1.1 kHz, a thud by the fourth.
SMALLER: each repeat higher than the last, up to half a semitone, until the tail is a shimmering cloud. Left of noon it sinks.
The DEPTH and DISTANCE jacks add to their knobs, 5 V the whole way round.

The deep ones

DISOBEY: the first three repeats are yours. Past that they start to slip a beat late, then take notes you didn't play, then read a bar from a while ago, and they stop fading.
Fully left they copy you and nothing's listening, so a steady drum in SAY is only a delay.

Five times

SAY: the audio in. Say the same thing five times, the same pitch or the same kind of hit, and one comes. Each time, one of the ring's five arcs brightens and runs further down the tunnel. Six quiet seconds and they lapse.
CALL: patched, it counts gates instead, and it doesn't listen to SAY.
It's the last thing you said, played backwards. It comes a reflection a pass, louder and nearer, and the rings go out from the far end, nearest last. It knocks on the glass as it comes.
At the front the ring flares, it goes on forwards, lower than you said it, and everything else in the tunnel is gone. For a pass the echoes are its.
With DISOBEY up, one comes when it likes.

What comes out

LEFT and RIGHT: SAY in the middle and the repeats, wide near the front, closing on the middle as they recede.
FAR: the deep repeats alone, from the fifth down, and the one that's coming while it's down there.
CAME: a gate, high for the pass it's at the front.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: a mirror you push, a big knob, 4 knobs, a lit button

Inputs

SAY: audio
CLOCK: a pulse a beat
CALL, BREAK: gates, rising past 1 V
DEPTH, DISTANCE: CVs, added to their knobs, 5 V the whole way

Outputs

LEFT, RIGHT: audio
FAR: audio
CAME: gate, 0/5 V