unlit by daylight noise

The UNLIT panel: black, with a dark corridor in gold dots running away down the middle, and four tall pale bars standing between the columns, two tall ones outside and two shorter ones inside, each with a thin gold rail down both sides. SHUT and HIT jacks in the outer columns with OPEN 1 and OPEN 4 at their feet, DEPTH, BLEED, UNDER and RING knobs between the bars, DEPTH and UNDER jacks and OPEN 2 and OPEN 3 under them, CHARGE, GLOW, UNLIT and ALL jacks down the middle and CHARGE the big knob at the foot. unlit 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. Hold a bar: press anywhere along it and stay there, or tab to it, set how high with the arrow keys and hold Enter or Space. How high you touch is how hard it fires; how long you hold is how much it keeps. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is a rack played through UNLIT: saws and reeds into SHUT, a sequencer at HIT, sometimes a kick beside it, sometimes nothing in it at all. All made in the page.

example patches

The gates, the curves and the hand-ons are UNLIT's engine as designed, running in your browser; the phosphor is a model of the real thing, fitted to published numbers; what goes into SHUT stands in for a rack. Each patch here starts with the cells dark. On the module nothing clears them but time.

The cells

Each cell is a piece of phosphor in the dark with violet LEDs on it and a sensor reading it. When the LEDs stop it goes on glowing, and what the sensor reads is how far the gate is open. The envelope isn't computed. It's a material running down.
It falls fast, then hangs on for a very long time: every time the time since the hit goes up ten times the light falls ten times, and it goes on doing that for hours. Plucks, then tails that don't quite end.
It remembers. A long hit fills it deeper than a short one, ten hits pile up, and what a cell keeps from last hour is under what it does now. It runs a little faster when it's warm.
The bars are the same phosphor under the same light, for your eye: lit as far up as the hit reached, and still lit long after you've stopped hearing it. In a dark room you can read the last few minutes off them.
Hold a bar and it fires under your finger. How high you touch is how hard; how long you hold is how much it keeps.

The glow

CHARGE, the big knob: how long a hit fires, how hard and how far up the bar, from a millisecond to three seconds. Fully left a tick; fully right one hit lights it for minutes. Held gates keep it charging, as hard as CHARGE is high.
DEPTH: how faint a glow still opens the gate, filter and level together. Fully left only the first flash gets through. Noon is a pluck. Fully right the faintest light the sensor can tell from the dark opens it wide.
UNDER: fully left the light opens the gate. Fully right it's the other way up: shut while it's bright, rising as the light dies, gone when it's dark. The hits keep it silent and the gaps are where it lives. At noon it's both, a pluck, a hole, and the note swelling back out of the hole.

Between the cells

BLEED: as a cell closes it hands what it has left to the next, one to two to three to four and round. A little and one hit is a quick roll that speeds up and dies. Full and it hands on everything, and it never goes out.
RING: the filter's resonance. Up, a hit kicks the filter itself, so with nothing patched a cell is a drum whose pitch slides down with its glow. Full, it sings by itself and the pitch is the light, falling for as long as there's any to read.

What goes in

SHUT 1 to 4: the audio. An unpatched one takes the one before it, so one sound can feed all four.
HIT 1 to 4: gates. A rising edge fires the cell as CHARGE says.
The CHARGE, DEPTH and UNDER jacks add to their knobs, 5 V the whole way round.

What comes out

OPEN 1 to 4: each gate. ALL: the four together.
GLOW: cell 1's actual reading as a CV, on a scale of decades, 1.3 V each: the slowest envelope you've ever patched.
UNLIT: a gate, high while all four are dark. Patch it into a HIT and it plays itself, as slowly as the light goes.

Specs

Format

Width: 20 HP
Controls: four bars you hold, a big knob, 4 knobs

Inputs

SHUT 1-4: audio
HIT 1-4: gates, rising past 1 V
CVs: CHARGE, DEPTH, UNDER, added to their knobs, 5 V the whole way

Outputs

OPEN 1-4: audio
ALL: audio
GLOW: CV, 0 to 8 V
UNLIT: gate, 0/5 V