Continual Transition - a Memory Machine [Sound/Noise Demonstration]

video upload by Ryan Gaston

"Continual Transition is an electronic sound-making device designed to engage memory, inspired by the unique otherworldly dread of isolation in the Ozarks.

Continual Transition uses a simple synthesis structure, modulated delay lines, sampling, and multiple internal feedback/feedforward nodes to create a chaotic, constantly evolving musical structure. Despite its use of relatively simple synthesis "building blocks," its embrace of chaos and its perhaps-peculiar parameterization makes it such that individual controls often results in individual knobs affecting many aspects of a sound's character, usually in nonlinear or unpredictable ways.

Continual Transition is comprised of two primary sections: on the left, a Temporal Reflection Interval Processor (TRIP), and on the right, an Arbitrarily Traversal Memory Register (ATMR). The TRIP and ATMR are intertwined via multiple intermodulation nodes, allowing them to influence one another's behavior in a number of ways. The TRIP is a continually-degrading memory process, in which user actions are echoed, multiplied, and obfuscated continually as time progresses. The ATMR is a sampling device, which assesses the device's total state for concentrated periods of time, locking small windows of "memory" into a buffer which can be bent, twisted, folded, and traversed linearly or chaotically.

By allowing these two forms of memory to commingle—and by gradually learning the relationship between individual controls, the immediate sound, and the way that sounds progress into the future—the user may develop a peculiar sense of "presentness," in which the events of the past and immediate future gain greater clarity and present actions take on greater-than-typical weight.

Continual Transition was created with a Bela Mini, Pure Data, simple custom circuitry, and Arkansan cedar sourced directly from the forests of the Ozarks. A limited number of Continual Transition devices were created in 2020. Despite initial goals to the contrary, there is no current plan to develop it into a commercial product.

If you want to learn more about Continual Transition (and to hear more examples of how it can sound), see the Summer 2019 edition of SciARC's Offramp online magazine here: https://offramp.sciarc.edu/articles/c..."