12 HP · freeze
A stereo freeze, caught in the headlights. Sound passes straight through until the headlights come on, from a gate at LIGHTS or a sudden loud jump at the input. Then it stops dead and the last moment is held, a smeared still, shaking as much as TREMBLE says, for as long as FEAR says. Then it bolts: back to the present at once, or sprinting through everything it missed until it catches up.
Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back.
example patches
The sound and the headlights here are THARN's own engine: the module's firmware, ported to the page and checked against it sample for sample. The drums, the bass, the pad and the voice it freezes are stand-ins for the rest of a rack.
IN L and IN R go straight to OUT L and OUT R, untouched, until something sets it off: a rising edge at LIGHTS or, with STARTLE up, a sudden jump at the input. Then the dry sound is gone in 4 ms and the moment is held in its place.
The held moment isn't a loop. THARN averages the spectrum of the frames round the trigger, about a tenth of a second before it and 40 ms after, so a hit that set it off is in the picture. It plays that back as a steady sound at the moment's level, every frequency at its own pitch: a chord becomes a drone, a snare a hiss in its own colour, a word one held vowel. Each side is frozen on its own. It's been listening all along, so the still is there the instant it's caught.
A fast envelope of the input against a slow one, both above 200 Hz so a long sub can't hide a crack. When the fast one jumps over the slow one by more than STARTLE's threshold, and past 0.4 V, it freezes itself and the headlights flash.
When FEAR runs out it bolts, and RUN fires. BOLT says how.
Twelve HP, every part on the line's staggered grid and mirrored about the middle. The art is a photograph of an old car coming head on at night in the rain, in gold dots on black, the wet road's reflections running down between the jacks as short gold dashes. Its round lamps are the module's headlights: cold white LEDs in chrome holders either side of FEAR, dark while it passes, glaring while it's frozen, brighter with the freeze's level.
Drag to look around. Lift the panel: the headlights' holders go with it, and their LEDs stay standing on the board. One RP2350 does it all, its two cores sharing the freeze.
THARN is designed and its firmware builds. Nothing has been made, so the numbers here are the design's and the engine's, not measurements, and there's no date.