An honest footnote to the last article
A few weeks ago I wrote about what a Mandelbrot set sounds like. The honest footnote to that piece is that most of the set is quiet. Deep inside, the escape values are flat. Far outside, flat again. Everything that makes a fractal sound like a fractal is crowded along the boundary, the infinitely detailed line where inside meets outside.
Laura's fractal oscillators read their waveform along a path through the set, and that path used to be a circle placed wherever you pointed the canvas. A well placed circle clips through the boundary at a couple of spots and picks up its character there; the rest of its length is spent in the flat regions on either side. You could hear the edge. You could not stay on it.
This update is about staying on it, and about giving the synth modulators that move the way the edge deserves.
Boundary lock: two ways to hold the edge
The fractal oscillators grew a three position control called Bound. Off is the circle you already know, and every old patch sounds untouched. The other two positions are the feature.
Lock keeps the circle but anchors it to a point on the set's edge. The synth looks outward from your view's centre, finds where the escape values cross from inside to outside, and parks the sampling right there. A Position knob slides that anchor along the edge, and a Width knob sets how tightly the circle hugs it. Turning Position feels like walking a coastline with the oscillator held to your ear: every step is a different cove.
Trace is the stranger one. It throws the circle away and reads the waveform along the edge itself, out and back across an arc of the boundary. The waveform is no longer a slice of the neighbourhood around the edge; it is the edge. It sounds less like a pad and more like the set talking, and it has become my favourite wrong answer in the whole synth.
Both modes work on Mandelbrot, Julia, and Multibrot. The other kernels quietly keep the classic circle, so nothing breaks when you switch.
The position is a mod target, which changes everything
A knob you can turn is nice. A knob the synth can turn is a sound. The boundary Position is a modulation target like Cutoff or Zoom, so anything instrument wide can drive it: an LFO, a macro, the sequencer's playhead, or the attractor below.
Route something slow onto it and the timbre strolls back and forth along the edge without ever leaving it. That is a kind of motion a wavetable position sweep cannot fake. The tone does not crossfade between stored frames. It travels.
The trouble with loops and steps
Once the oscillator could sit on the edge, the next problem showed up immediately: none of my modulators moved the right way. An LFO loops, so the walk along the coastline repeats every cycle and your ear catches it by the third pass. Sample and hold jumps, which reads as teleporting rather than walking. What the edge wanted was a wanderer.
So this update adds two.
Drift, the random that glides
Drift is a new LFO shape, sitting next to sample and hold in the list. It picks the same random targets, but instead of stepping to each one it glides there, easing out of the old value and into the new. The result moves like a hand on a knob, not a machine switching states.
It earns a place everywhere once you have it. Slow Drift on filter cutoff gives you a patch that never sits still and never calls attention to itself. Slow Drift on the boundary Position is the coastline walk I built it for.
A chaos attractor in the top row
The second wanderer is the strange one. At the right end of the LFO row there is now a small window with an orbit drawing itself, and three badges labelled X, Y, and Z. That is a chaos attractor, a tiny physics system of three values circling each other under simple rules. The orbit never settles, never repeats, and never jumps. It swoops through the same territory forever, along a path it has never quite taken before.
The three channels are ordinary mod sources. Drag a badge onto any knob, the same drag you use for an LFO, or pick Chaos X, Y, or Z in the matrix. All three come from one orbit, so they are related without ever being in step, which makes them right for driving two or three parameters that should feel like aspects of a single motion. Click the window to pick the system: Lorenz for bold loops with sudden changes of heart, Rossler for calm spirals with an occasional kick, Thomas for a slow, even weave. One Rate knob scales the speed of the whole orbit.
It free runs, and every voice hears the same orbit, so modulation from it feels less like an effect on each note and more like weather moving through the patch.
And the LFOs learned to drive each other
Every LFO's rate and depth are now matrix targets too. An envelope can fade a vibrato in over the length of a note. One LFO can slow another down as it swells. And yes, you can route LFO 1 into LFO 2's rate and LFO 2 back into LFO 1's. The loop is stable, each side keeps bending the other, and the pair settles into a lopsided rhythm that never quite closes on itself.
None of this needed a new panel. They are targets in the same matrix, filled by the same drag as everything else.
The patch this update is really about
Set OSC A to Fractal on Mandelbrot and point the canvas at the seahorse valley, where the main body meets the smaller bulb. Turn Bound to Lock. Drag Chaos X onto the Position knob at a small depth, and hold one low note.
The oscillator now walks the edge of the set along an orbit that will never repeat, so the note you are holding never quite happens twice. Flip Bound to Trace on the same patch and the coastline itself becomes the waveform. That is the whole update in one sound: the most detailed line in mathematics, and a way of moving along it that is as restless as the line itself.
The demo is free and fully featured for thirty minutes a session, no account needed. Find an edge and stay on it.
Keep reading
- Why your tempo synced LFO is in the wrong place · Set an LFO to one bar, print the loop, and it sounds right. Stop the transport, hit play again, and the same bar sounds different. The rate was never wrong. The position was.
- How to program a tape stop instead of drawing one · Every glitch fill you have printed was drawn by hand, once, for one drop, at one tempo. The alternative is to write time as a pattern and let the fill happen on the bar, every bar, without you being there.
- How to build a riser that never ends · Every riser you have printed ends somewhere. It runs out of top, or it loops and you hear the seam. A longer sweep will not fix it. What does is an illusion that has been sitting in the psychoacoustics literature since 1964.
Hear it for yourself. The demo is free and unrestricted for 30 minutes per session.