A little side-note on the Turing/Quantussy/Rungler Audulus implementations: Something that I did notice while playing around with STS’s Copier and Turing Machine was that patches would open in exactly the same state as last, something that Richard Brewster also draws attention to in the post on his Audulus Quantussy.

One very interesting feature of an Audulus patch is that it will start off playing in the exact state in which it was saved. So, very much unlike the analog Quantussy, I think that the sequence of events created by the software Quantussy may be able to repeat exactly.

Following on that, Rob Hordijk’s thoughts on the differences between digital and analogue implementations of these kinds of cicuits:

Imho a rungler circuit works best in an analog electronics implementation. It is definitively more alive and surprising due to the slight instabilities in the analog circuitry. I did digital implementations, but they can’t beat the ‘organic behaviour’ of the analog versions. But this is just personal taste…

The Din Datin Dudero – ‘the original, esoteric analog synth for babies’ – something that caught my eye amongst all the unusual on the Ciat Lonbarde site. There’s also the Nobsrine:

It is for babies of DJs and noise musicians, who want to introduce their children to strange sounds, chaos magic, the idea of infinite degrees of relationship between tones, without the more complicated techniques involved in uper crust CIAT INSTRUMENTS.

I was wondering about the relationship between all these instruments and Rob Hordijk’s ‘patches in a box’, and sure enough, looking though the images for the Din Datin Dudero I stumble across:

Stuber shall have two knobs, a philter mechanism for audio and also for gesture, with Q control. The binary matrix reinterprets resonances, as a “Rungler.”

Here’s a video of their creator Peter B. explaining his Plumbutter.

While playing around creating drone-like textures with STS’s Turing Machine, I got to thinking of Pugix’s Audulus Quantussy drones that I came across in the forum a few weeks ago. He has a nice post on his website explaining it all along with some sound examples.

I was curious to take a look at the hardware Quantussy (What is the Quantussy?) that provided the inspiration for Richard’s version, and that led me to some of the most unusual modules I’ve yet come across. As described on the website:

Ciat-Lonbarde specializes in intuitive analog organs for your atonal/chaos squishing needs. The following instruments are assembled in Baltimore out of local wood, and machine assembled circuit-boards that are hazmat free.

The circuit boards are works of art in themselves. Here’s a Reddit Inquiry into the artsy-hipster side of Synthesis, and an ilovefuzz.com thread with a number of videos of these instruments in action.

Interesting post on Synthtopia today on a web implementation of the 1971 Triadex Muse – a digital algorithmic sequencer. Donald Tillman, who implemented the sequencer in HTML5 and JavaScript, explains on his site that it includes a 31-bit shift register fed by the unusual ‘theme switches’ on the sequencer.

Shift registers are something that I first learned about via Rob Hordijk telling about the workings of his Rungler. In a masterclass on noise generators he explains the basic shift register principles and usage (at around 6′ in the video) before going on to tell a little about the history of how he first came to make use of it in a musical context (from around 10′50″ onwards) – and how a happy accident in that first encounter laid the ground for his Rungler, Benjolin, and Blippoo circuits.

The Audulus forum has also, once again, proved a fertile learning ground with an interesting discussion and example patches in the Rungler thread.