trip | Temporal Reflection Interval Processor (2018)

The Temporal Reflection Interval Processor (TRIP) patch was first developed in 2018, based on a signal processing concept that revealed itself in a dream. After waking, I rode to work on a train—during this train trip, I built the patch I had imagined in Max/MSP/gen~ and, somewhat surprisingly, it proved to be a very dynamic and organic-sounding way of generating chaotic musical structures.

TRIP emerged after a fairly concentrated period of deep study into archetypal synthesis algorithms—I had previously explored granular synthesis, phase modulation, wavetable synthesis, and specific concepts from Don Buchla and Rob Hordijk in applications like Temporal Conduit Oscillator (TCO), Multiple Contour Integrator (MCI), Phase Puzzle, and others. TRIP, at the time, felt like the first of these that wasn’t explicitly based on concepts with which I was already familiar—though it certainly bore resemblance in execution to many of these other explorations into classic synthesis methods. Like these other applications, TRIP was strongly focused on chaotic sound generation, as well as the spontaneous emergence of musical form/structure from minute alterations to chaotic signal flow architectures.

Conceptually, TRIP is fairly simple: it utilizes a single sinusoidal oscillator, a modulate-able delay line, a multiplier, and multiple panning processes. By connecting these through various feedback/feedforward nodes, it becomes possible to create everything from phase modulation and wavefolder-like drones all the way to sputtering, continually evolving gestural textures.

TRIP was never developed into a self-sufficient software application, but it has made several appearances in various other contexts. The first use of TRIP in another work was a polyphonic adaptation of its signal architecture, a relatively late addition to the MIGSI 2 Application (seen in the screen shot above). Ultimately, though, I realized that its strengths were more apparent when explored monophonically with multiple high-resolution physical controls. As such, I ultimately re-built it in Pure Data, using the code as the basis for multiple hardware devices based on the Bela platform.

Eventually, TRIP became the basis of Continual Transition—an instrument that paired TRIP with an Arbitrarily Traversable Memory Register (loosely related to my explorations with Multiple Buffer Traversals and many other patch concepts). TRIP is still used frequently in my work, and is the partial basis for multiple tentative/forthcoming hardware designs.

You can read more about TRIP in Continual Transition: Making a Memory Machine—an article I contributed to Sci-ARC’s Offramp regarding the device’s modeling of temporal perception, memory, and trauma.