Crystal

Crystal is a 3D echo chamber shaped like a real crystal. Stereo in, quad out: the four outputs are four listeners standing inside the shape. Crystal is 28 HP.

Sixteen crystal habits are built from real symmetry: cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, the sphalerite tetrahedron, pyrite, quartz, and the low-symmetry systems, ordered simple to complex. The last four are clusters, several whole crystals grown together, so a ray can be trapped in one or wander between them.

How it works

The room is traced by letting rays loose inside the shape. Every wall strike sheds an echo toward each of the four interior listeners, and that set of arrivals is the quad output. Tracing runs on a worker thread and the audio thread adopts the new taps with a crossfade, so you can change the shape while it plays.

• CHAMBER keeps real acoustic timing. DELAY keeps the geometry’s arrival ratios but stretches them to musical times, with SIZE becoming the delay time.
• A bigger habit rings longer, sized by the crystal’s own volume and surface area.
• Two emitters, each steerable with X/Y velocity CV, so you move where the sound comes from rather than jumping it.
• Rotating the display is camera-only. The shape you hear is the shape that’s there.

Inputs and outputs

• Controls: Size, Damp, Material (habit), Tail, Mix, Echoes, Feedback, Decay, Ping, Mode (chamber / delay), the two emitters’ aim and motion, and the view.
• Inputs: Audio, Audio B, Ping, V/OCT, Size, Damp, Material, Tail, Mix, Echoes, Feedback, and X/Y velocity per emitter.
• Outputs: Quad A / B / C / D.

Patch idea

A room you can play. Nothing patched, MIX fully wet, MODE on chamber. Ping it and pick a habit to hear the bare resonance of each shape. Then patch a voice into Audio and automate an emitter’s X/Y velocity so the source drifts through the crystal while you take the four corners into a quad or stereo mix.