OAM's Patience - A Eurorack LFO Module With a Cycle Rate That Can be Set for Decades

Folding & Unfolding Sine Waves w/ Patience and XPO video upload by Olivia Artz Modular



via Kickstarter

"Patience is an LFO that allows you to set the duration of a change in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, days, month, years, or decades.

Our thinking

Eurorack is widely considered to be an esoteric and expensive way to make music. That’s one framing. Another framing is that Eurorack is a mid-90s platform for modular electronic art that lasted. VRML came and went. RSS flourished and rescinded. Web pages don’t really use HTML anymore. But Eurorack is still. It is a time-tested and community-driven foundation for building conceptual art. For installation art. For slow art. In these contexts the modules that you already have can transform in meaning.

For instance, a clock divider may be used for tracking musical time and for building up musical rhythms. But if your clock divider has primes as an option and you trigger it once a day, the 7’s output will give you a pulse a week. Suddenly you’re patch-programming a calendar. You’re now keeping track of time on the scale of years. You’ve moved from the music of humans to the music of the seasons.

This is where Patience comes in. To help your patches operate at these time scales we made an LFO capable of making a single modulation over the course of hours, days, months, years, or even decades.

Why me
For more than twenty-five years I’ve been studying, designing, and programming systems for slow sound art. Under Pauline Oliveros I studied and practiced deep listening. I worked with Seth Cluett on glacial multi-channel performance systems. I’ve cared deeply about slow art my entire life. Patience is an expression of this and I will give it everything I have.

Why Kickstarter
If we know up front that we have guaranteed orders for Patience we can afford to dedicate the time that this idea deserves. Refining the design, circuitry, software, and assembly process. This is the only way we can foresee making the best possible version of Patience, so here we are.




Details

Width: 14 HP

Frequency range: 60 Hz down to one cycle every 60 years (or 600 years, undetermined)

Waveforms: stepped random, sine wave, triangle wave, ramp up, ramp down, square wave, and a trigger that fires once per cycle

Voltage range: switchable on the faceplate between bipolar -5 V to +5 V and unipolar 0 V to 5 V

Physical lock (with spare key) to disable the interface

Button and gate input for resetting the waveform

More on the special edition

All backers get the same 14 HP Eurorack module with the same functionality. The difference is the faceplate of the special edition. For that, artist and harshnoise synth demon Cassilda Desdemona will acid-etch her design into nickel silver.