- Circle 2 1 2 – Uniquely Intuitive Audio Synthesizer Input Software
- Circle 2 1 2 – Uniquely Intuitive Audio Synthesizer Input Module
My name is Plumbutter. My face is a psycho-geographical map of the cities of Baltimore and Cleveland. I am a drum-machine, but let me tell you I am more than that, for I also am a “drama machine”. Thus there exists in me, a dialectic between drum and drama, like cops and gangsters, male versus female, or rural versus urban. You can see my wild spaces are represented by a deer-horn, and my downtown by a factory, and in between, a vast swath of suburban developments. It is a gradient of these three areas- urban, suburban, and rural- that informs my electronic synthesis.
The unit circle is a circle of radius 1 unit that is centered on the origin of the coordinate plane. The unit circle is fundamentally related to concepts in trigonometry. The trigonometric functions can be defined in terms of the unit circle, and in doing so, the domain of these functions is extended to all real numbers. The unit circle is also related to complex numbers. 61-key Synthesizer with Aftertouch, I-Arpeggio, Onboard FX, Mic Input, AUX In, TS and Balanced XLR Outputs, MIDI, USB-to-Host, USB-to-Device, 2 Headphone Outputs, and 2 Pedal Jacks Rated 4.5/5 15 reviews Write your review Item ID: JupiterX.
Urban, in me, represents a strong sense of rhythm, churned out of machines powered by transformers and electricity which comes from an incinerator, a smokestack. You can see the silhouette of this silo on the left. The factories' product is “beats”, the pulse of urbanity.
These pulses are connected, patched with wire, to suburban “inputs”, to hear them. The beat is there converted into more human-shaped forms, electronic sounds that convey meaning in their resonances. An organo-form matrix of three types of suburban developments: Gong, AV-Dog, and Ultrasound.
Gong represents the palaces of ritual like a gong which signals the entrance of dignitaries, or courses in a special meal. Gong is triggered by an urban beat, but only after pausing for the proper duration of time, and it is the simultaneous action of multiple gongs that creates change-ringing, or hocketing, across a stereo field.
AV-Dog is a complement to Gong in the suburban matrix,and they are both placed together in checkerboard fashion. AV-Dog resonates the urban trigger, like a dancer or a pool of water. Yes, that is more like it- that the urban beat triggers divers who jump into a pool, and create waves there. These waves jostle sonic buoys, which are the output of this development. They show the rate of resonance within the urban product, they are a detector of resonances at the frequencies of human brainwaves.
Ultrasound is wedged in the heart of suburban development. It represents bats, which should be present in a good suburb. They indicate lush foliage, and they eat mosquitoes. And they sing at ultrasonic frequencies, which is what this module is all about- listening to ultrasound.
I am a psycho-geographical map of a utopian city, or perhaps shall we say, a “70s dystopia”. For there are flaws everywhere- heavy metals downtown, suburbs which cannot use power sustainably, and prior exploitations in the wilderness. But in general, all is good, as in my “republican” days. And by republican, I mean to say that I once was a republic, like old Rome- a formal grouping of various apparatus onto one “circuit board”. My republic was named “Roolz-Gewei”, and that is my official name on facebook.
My wildernesses flanked me, on separate circuit boards, and were not integrated. These deerhorn represent invisible radio fields that sense any movement nearby, and through synthesizer organs, do bellow and rut. The deerhorn were separate and now are integrated in m'plumbutter. Thus it can be said “a system of interstates (power lines) connects Little Italy to a nuclear reactor in the woods.”
![Synthesizer Synthesizer](https://medias.arturia.net/images/products/sem-v/semvselect_big.jpg)
A 5-tiered stratification was my republic- Agricultural Cycles, Maritime and Shipping, Ultrasonic Manufacturing Center, Palatial Complices, and Pulsemining. This was my mental map, which contributed to my baroque psycho-geography, along with various utterances from the wilderness- the secret language of the hunter mixed with the sounds of beasts.
This was a baroque time in my development, meaning that the various “twittering machines” that made up my drum machine, they were all tuned to various indigenous frequencies, and there was no common standard. It became a goal to reform this baroque republic into a “Laboratory Roolz-Gewei”, and this means the following:
![Circle 2 1 2 – Uniquely Intuitive Audio Synthesizer Input Circle 2 1 2 – Uniquely Intuitive Audio Synthesizer Input](https://medias.arturia.net/images/products/pigments/pigments-image.png)
- Every resonance and frequency of oscillation is tunable by a laboratory knob with exponential range.
- Every resonance or frequency also has an input for modulation, to create more complex dependencies.
- To integrate the wilderness into the psycho-map of the city.
I am now called Plumbutter, after my designer whose name is “Petroleum Bottle,” and his early encounters with lead (Plumbum) in Cleveland. This name, Plumbutter, is much better than, and encapsulates all of my previous names: Man with the Red Steam (an urban drum beater), Rolz-5 (a drum machine village), Roolz-Gewei (the old republican stratification), and Laboratory Roolz-Gewei (which I am). My name is supremely better than those because it rolls off the tongue well. Think of it as a codename: Plumbutter.
'The Agamemnon Computer'
I orchestrated it with headaches and dry-mouth,
Looking at the Palatial Complex with my alien eyes.
Full moon: organized a great virgins' circle dance,
Gave tambourines and ankle bells to the lunatics,
Covered their nappy thongs and green skin
With columnar tunics.
Told the men to make auloi squeal
So nasal that the whines beat great tones
So as to hew and float the great stones
Now they stand in astrolabe rings,
Where I hunch an old man with no things
Except a skullcap to protect
My bald head from the starz.
I orchestrated it with headaches and dry-mouth,
Looking at the Palatial Complex with my alien eyes.
Full moon: organized a great virgins' circle dance,
Gave tambourines and ankle bells to the lunatics,
Covered their nappy thongs and green skin
With columnar tunics.
Told the men to make auloi squeal
So nasal that the whines beat great tones
So as to hew and float the great stones
Now they stand in astrolabe rings,
Where I hunch an old man with no things
Except a skullcap to protect
My bald head from the starz.
-Petroleum Bottle Ifinance 4 4 7 – comprehensively manage your personal finances.
To make my suburban developments, Petroleum Bottle, took my basic twittering machines that were in my republic, and converted them to voltage controlled, laboratory oscillators and resonators. This was done with the help of interstitial paper circuits called AV-Dog Studio and Gongue Studio. The use of paper circuits is very helpful in prototyping complicated building blocks. Then this relatively expansive design was folded down over itself to create my organic suburban footprints. The final module has a sort of pocket in the middle, which is reserved for the special trigger input jack, which is green.
If you want to understand something about 70s suburbs, you must understand industrial color relationships. Prior to the 20th century, color theories derived from natural sources, such as vegetable pigments and looking at rainbows. The mystic thinker, Rudolph Steiner, named seven (7) colors that make up our plane of existence, including “violet” as the highest note of spiritual resonance. But none of these spectra contained the idea of “black” or “white” or “gray” as colors. In the twentieth century, however, we have plastic manufacturing, which can easily create these “colors”. Thus the makers of Johnson Banana Jacks provide ten (10) standard hues: Red, Black, White, Green, Orange, Yellow, Brown, Blue, Violet, and Grey. It is thus a central tactic of suburban planning to use all of these colors in the overall plan.
Inputs are cool colors, such as blue, violet, and green. Outputs are hot colors: orange, red, and yellow. Audio outputs are white. Ground is always reserved as the black banana jack. Grey has a special meaning, as noise or another kind of off-beat or rebellious signal. It is a sort of special sauce, designed to cause the drum machine to diverge from normalcy. Brown is a mixture of hot and cool colors (red and green), so it represents special, androgynous nodes, sections of the urban beat that can be “circuit bent” to each other.
In “Laboratory Roolz-Gewei schematic,” published by Ciat-Lonbarde, much was made of the drum/drama dialectic, and the mediation of the suburbs. The schematics are concluded by a purely symbolic photo montage. I have been using pornographic images, combined with electronic symbols, to convey particular meanings of electronic sounds, such as “analog,” “organic,” and relationships such as “69”.
This montage is about “drum versus drama”. At the beach, the drummer Tommy Lee carries a boogey board, and juts his chin, while Pamela Anderson looks inwards with blonde hair unfurled over her breasts and panty-line. Over and behind the coupling, are the black-light doping patterns for three silicon chips used in the drum-machine. 4015 is the ocean in the background, that says “DIMENSIONS MAY DIFFER, CONTACT YOUR SALES OFFICE”. 4013, dual flip-flop is Tommy Lee, and 40106 hex trigger as Pamela. They were chosen purely based on form- 40106 as asymmetrical and sensuous. 4013 as tattoed, primal and jutting. This montage helped me create a mental image of the dialectic between drum and drama, and relate it to the silicon chips that function in the machine.
The deerhorn module went through several revisions on paper over about five years. When I say 'on paper', the circuits were actually printed and built on long paper boards. The circuits were long because of the essential nature of a radio field, which requires spacing from other radio fields. Thus, the deerhorn design has two radio fields, which must be separated by a long space of other circuitry that is not at radio frequency, such as normal analog processes.
Deerhorn began as a simple heterodyne circuit not unlike that of the theremin, and a gestural enveloping circuit that ensured the instrument only sounds with movement, and is silent at stillness. Then I added more apparatus onto this circuit- a frequency to voltage converter derived from the theremin tone, a gestural resonator of this varying voltage, and finally, a phase locked loop circuit which responds most sensitively to the finest movements.
Throughout this development period, the concept of deerhorn was developed in symbols and indeed, in text, on the circuit board. It forms a psycho-geographical map of the hunt for deer: a hunter blows a horn to beckon deer, he searches for mast, the food of deer, and listens for their rutting calls in the woods. He is seeking to bleed a deer and open it up. In the shamanic traditions of North Korea, a fox seen in the woods is quite a bad thing, for it can mean possession and/or mental disolution. These 'foxes' did not appear at all like the English fox, but rather as a sort of maggot/brain floating in midair, semi-transparent as a ghost would be.
The fox is a symbol of the psychological terrors associated with deep woods. The hunter, having succeeded in securing a slab of deer meat, to eat in his cabin in the woods, he also kept the deerhorn. These he will use as symbols of his virility, and to construct strong tools and to use as a finish on musical instruments.
In Mexico, hunting for 'deer' literally means to hunt for peyote, a psychadelic cactus. You can see that there is a field of meaning around deer and the woods, that is used to proxy for other, more sublime concepts. In Germany, a hunter speaks a secret language of false-meanings, intended to fool the forest into yielding deer-prey. These words were printed en masse on the circuit boards and explained with symbols- noise is the internal organs of a deer once it is opened, sweat is the blood which is shed from the deer, organing is the sound of deer in heat and rutting, and noise-syncronization is to imitate these sounds.
And finally, we have the deerhorn rack itself, what can we say about the shape of two deerhorn, arching out from a central plexus of hair and brain? One imagines the tips of the horns have an invisible electric charge that helps the deer sense its way through the woods, and find other deer. That is the analogy that is directly carried into the deerhorn instrument- sensing movement by modulation of an invisible field around an antenna.
I often wrestle with words about what I do. I build synthesizers out of wood and circuits, so I spend just as much time with saw as with the soldering iron. But this term, “build synthesizers”, does not cover the conceptual and indeed philosophical processes involved in designing the instruments. In face, it takes about as much time to design a run of synths as it takes to then build them for a few years. And between the doxis and praxis there is also the wonderful moment of synthesis, when all the planning and prototyping lessons learned are integrated and encased for the first time in a wooden coffin. One does in fact “synthesize a synthesizer”.
Circle 2 1 2 – Uniquely Intuitive Audio Synthesizer Input Software
An example of a problem in synthesynthesis is that of knob orientation. The iconoclastic clockwise means that any user has been trained to expect more in that direction. Wanting more bass, intuitively turn it up clockwise. Wanting a higher frequency, turn it up clockwise. Monologue 1 0 – quick and easy notes for a. You can see that a synthesynthesist must be wary of the handedness of controls.
In the Plumbutter, all knobs work in this clockwise direction- you can turn up the speed, or q, or frequency, by turning the knob clockwise. Plumbutter is a map of a city, starting from the inside and going out, so to fully traverse the city, you need a dual plumbutter. And a dual plumbutter can only be constructed by rotating by degrees, keeping the factories in the middle and the deerhorns on the outside. So one is rotated, but its knobs still work in the typical clockwise-more manner.
This synthesynthesis topic is called 'boustrephodon' after the Ancient Greek method of writing on parchment, 'as the cow turns the field'. In ancient times, it was not known which direction to write, from left or right, so they did both. Instead of picking up the pen at the end of the line, they just wrote backwards on the next line, thinking this to be more efficient. On the Plumbutter, the vector in to the city, when it becomes a vector out, the modules are read backwards.
Within the suburban modules there is a nested boustrephodon, as the modules rotate around an invisible point, and half are upside down. The logic is to propagate a 'boustrephodon' type thought-process that would carry over to the macro level, making a dual Plumbutter not so alien in the obverse suburbs. This is so necessary to have the psycho-geography be consistent- factories must stay in the core, and deerhorn at the periphery, especially since the deerhorn antennae (not seen here) are on the farthest edge of the case.
What a nice unit. I hope that this talk on synthesynthesis topics inspires you to seek them out as a highest priority in your designs, to not think only on the short term but try to envision how things will all fit together in the extended products.
Circle 2 1 2 – Uniquely Intuitive Audio Synthesizer Input Module
Where my father dealt with water and the lungs and surgery cuts bloody red,
I work in veins of copper laced together with arteries of tin and lead.
Mainstage 3 4 4 6. My skin is wood, that is good. My father is dead, I eat lead.
He was deputy assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, and a doctor.
I am creator of schematics for frequency modulated triangle oscillators.
-Petroleum Bottle
I work in veins of copper laced together with arteries of tin and lead.
Mainstage 3 4 4 6. My skin is wood, that is good. My father is dead, I eat lead.
He was deputy assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, and a doctor.
I am creator of schematics for frequency modulated triangle oscillators.
-Petroleum Bottle