signalscope

find them before the sun goes

20 HP

Six players stand round a sky. Point the scope at one and it comes in clear; the rest are far off, faint and crackling. All through the loop the sun swells, until it goes white and you wake by the fire. Find all six before it does, and the ending changes.

The SIGNALSCOPE panel: a radio dish at night, in gold dots on black. AIM, the big knob, sits at the dish's middle in a fan of rays of bare circuit board, with six round windows past their ends, the places in the sky; WAKE's button sits under it. ONE, TWO and THREE run up the left side, FOUR, FIVE and SIX down the right; LOOP and SUN above the sky, BEAM and FAR below it; AIMED and SUPERNOVA in the top corners, L and R at the foot. signalscope 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. WAKE is a button: press it and the sun goes now. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is six stand-in players into ONE to SIX and what comes out of L and R. It's all made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The scope, the far, the sun and the loop here are SIGNALSCOPE's engine as it's designed, running in your browser. The players are a stand-in for the rest of a rack. A loop at noon here is a minute and a half; on the module it's twenty-two minutes.

The sky

Six places stand round AIM, each a round window past the ends of the rays. Whatever you plug into a player's jack stands at its place, panned by it, and the scope brings in what it points at.

ONE to SIX: audio in, ±5 V. ONE at the lower left of the sky, round to SIX at the lower right.
AIM: where the scope points, its line the pointer. Its jack adds a voltage, so an LFO sweeps the whole sky.
BEAM: how wide it sees. Fully left one place, exactly, alone; noon one at a time; fully right every place at once.

The far

Everything the scope isn't on is far: thinned like a radio a long way off, crackling, fading in and out, and late, its echoes trailing. Sweep the scope and the far ones bend in pitch as their distance changes.

FAR: how far. Fully left the others are gone; noon faint and far; fully right a long way off and all round you, crackling hard, nearly a second late.

The loop

The sun, in the rays round AIM, swells all through the loop: everything grows brighter, louder and more driven. At the end it collapses, the sound sucks inward, and it goes: a white wipe out across the stereo field, then silence, and you wake by the fire, faint and far again.

LOOP: how long, from eight seconds to an hour. Twenty-two minutes at noon (a minute and a half on this page).
SUN: how big it gets, and how soon. Fully left it never swells; fully right the whole sky runs hot almost at once.
WAKE: the button, or a gate at its jack: the end, now. A clock into it puts the explosion on the bar. Its cap is the fire.

Finding them

Hold the scope on a player for a few seconds and it's found: its window stays lit, and it sounds nearer for the rest of the loop. A sweep passing by finds nothing. Find all six in one loop and the ending changes: no collapse and no wipe. They all come in together, clear, wide and full, until a slow white bloom.

What comes out

L, R: the whole sky in stereo, each player at its place.
AIMED: only what the scope hears, in mono.
SUPERNOVA: a gate, high from the sun's end until you wake. Its rise is the explosion, its fall the dawn.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: 5 knobs (AIM's big), a lit button

Inputs

Players: ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX: audio, ±5 V
AIM: CV, ±5 V, added to the knob
WAKE: gate, the loop's end on each rise

Outputs

L, R: audio, ±5 V
AIMED: audio, ±5 V, mono
SUPERNOVA: gate, 5 V from the sun's end until you wake