DTCO | Dual Temporal Conduit Oscillator (2017)

Shortly after creating Temporal Conduit Oscillator (TCO), I coincidentally came into contact with a musician/acupuncturist who was seeking assistance in planning a Eurorack modular synthesizer, and wanted assistance learning how best to build a performance practice around his new instrument. He was already, from my perspective, a quite unique and singular performer, albeit a quirky one.

He had many distinct instrument setups that he used for various purposes—an intricate system of interconnected magnetic card readers (a couple of years before Hainbach), a quite large Serge modular system, etc. He owned exact duplicates of most of his instruments, for reasons I never fully sorted out.

His most interesting setup, from my perspective, was made of two Hordijk Blippoo Boxes and two Akai Hexacomps. The Blippoo, of course, is a chaotic electronic instrument developed by Rob Hordijk. The Akai Hexacomp is intended to be used as a multiband compressor pedal for guitar/bass—but its filter slopes are quite steep, and the compression functions make it possible to completely silence each EQ band. So, the Hexacomp can be effectively used as a combination compressor/fixed filter bank. The musician I’m describing frequently performed by connecting each Blippoo Box to its own Hexacomp, and then would perform a sort of manual “spectral crossfading” by adjusting the balance of individual bands on each Blippoo Box with respect to one another. It sounded incredible, and frankly is a dang good idea.

Shortly thereafter, I was asked by Sarah Belle Reid to help build a self-sufficient software for live electronic improvisation for a couple of her upcoming performances—we had worked together previously on developing MIGSI, but at that point, MIGSI’s general approach involved creating brand-new patches for every performance. As such, we started brainstorming ways to make a more general-purpose software for live performance.

Dual Temporal Conduit Oscillator (DTCO) was the first result. Inspired by the aforementioned dual Blippoo/dual Hexacomp setup and my own recent development of the TCO, I created a program which combined two TCOs with a “Spectral Compositor”—a sort of filter bank/vocoder/crossfader hybrid that allowed for multiple means of generating a composite signal from spectral analysis/blending of the two TCOs’ output signals. It could be used as a simple fixed filter bank, a spectral crossfader, or even as a bi-directional vocoder.

Like the TCO and its companion softwares (MCI, Phase Puzzle, etc.), DTCO was optimized for live performance via OSC and user input from a QWERTY keyboard. It featured performable means of global state storage/recall, as well as global and local randomization.

After Sarah Belle Reid and I had each played/performed with DTCO a couple of times, it became clear just how much mileage you could get out of two TCOs in live performance—but DTCO was not a terribly extensible software. I quickly abandoned DTCO and began work on the MIGSI 2 Application, which at first was simply two TCOs joined by some data processing for the MIGSI hardware, connected together via a patching system similar to that previously implemented in the Virtual 200 application.

Though I generally stopped using DTCO once development on the MIGSI 2 Application began, the Spectral Compositor is the basis for multiple tentative/forthcoming hardware and software device concepts.