thaw by daylight noise

thaw

you can't hurry it

20 HP

It's frozen: whatever you last fed it is locked in a plate of black ice. Put your thumb on the plate and hold it there. Nothing happens. A few seconds on, the heat of your hand gets through, and that band of the sound creaks, sags, drips and runs. Let go and it takes twenty seconds to set again, around whatever's playing.

The plate

Twelve floes of bare gold under black ink, split by real cracks, sunk into the panel where a thumb goes. Each floe is a band of the sound, low at the foot, high at the head, with a temperature sensor under it. The ink clears where it's warm, so your thumb leaves a print, and it's the same heat the sensors read. There's no touch sensor. Heat is the only way in.

It takes three or four seconds for a thumb to start a floe going and ten or so for it to be water, and the heat creeps across the cracks slowly. Lift off and the ice is closing for up to twenty seconds, each piece setting as it cools, and your print stays about twice as long. A hot cup thaws it at once. An ice cube freezes it hard, and hard ice is brittle.

Your thumb: warms the floes under it, about a third of the spectrum. A fingertip takes less. A whole hand takes it all.

A knock: rap the plate with a knuckle, the same as a gate at BREAK.

SUN: the sound warms the plate too, band by band. At noon the ice only stirs with the music. At full a long note melts its own way through.

SALT: the melting point. Fully left a thumb can't quite do it. At noon it can. Past three o'clock it goes under the plate's own warmth, and at full it's all water with nobody touching it. Salt takes a few seconds to act.

The ice

Each floe holds its band frozen. Warm it and it lets go a little at a time, each piece into the live sound, and when it cools each piece sets on whatever was playing at that moment, so what freezes is a passage and not an instant.

DEPTH, the big knob: how much it holds. Fully left the sound goes straight through a skin of ice. At noon it holds what it sets on and the rack is shut out. At full it keeps taking, and a whole song stands in it.

SAG: softening ice sinks in pitch, up to an octave. What sagged stays sagged until it's been water, so three warm hands take a chord down three steps.

DRIP: drops fall where it's going, each one taken from what's frozen, so they're in its key and they use it up. At full it's rain.

BRITTLE: a floe warming against a cold one cracks. Up the knob it takes less, and a knock takes more: at full, one knock brings it all down in shards, and it sets again on what's playing now.

What goes in

POUR L, R: audio. Unpatched, POUR R takes POUR L. Ice only sets on sound, so a silent band stays open until something lands in it.

HEAT: a CV that drives the module's own heaters, a degree a volt, so a slow envelope does what your thumb does and the ink shows it.

THUMB: where along the plate HEAT goes, foot at 0 V and head at 8 V. Unpatched it warms all of it. A slow random voltage here rewrites the ice one band at a time.

BREAK: a gate: a knock.

What comes out

LEFT, RIGHT: the ice and the water. A mono sound freezes wide.

MERCURY: the warmest floe, a volt a degree above the room. It's as slow as the plate, one of the slowest envelopes there is.

WATER: a gate, high while a thumb's width of it has gone to water.

DROPS: a trigger for each drop.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: a twelve-floe heat plate, 5 knobs, 1 big knob

Inputs

POUR L, R: audio
HEAT: CV, 0 to 10 V, a degree a volt
THUMB: CV, 0 to 8 V, foot to head
BREAK: gate

Outputs

LEFT, RIGHT: audio
MERCURY: CV, 0 to 10 V
WATER: gate, 5 V
DROPS: trigger, 5 V