A couple of months ago marylou donated one of her translators to This Museum Is Not Obsolete and I immediately fell in love with it. Sadly I did not have any Bela boards so I couldn’t build my own, but I found the zine where she describes the machine in detail and grabbed the Pure Data patch. Soon after I had a version running on my laptop.
Then it dawned on me I have a couple of machines capable of running Pure Data, and that I might as well port it to one of those, so I wouldn’t need my laptop and I would have more direct control over the parameters - and here we are!
Both the Organelle and the desktop patches are available for download.
Code#
This project is maintained on GitHub.
Closing remarks#
My initial thoughts were to use the Aux button as a modifier for the knobs, so that all parameters could be controlled using the Organelle’s knobs - the bird translator has more parameters than the Organelle has knobs.
However, I really dislike multi-page setups when using knobs, as you either have to store and recall the values for every page, or your knobs will be in the wrong position as you move between pages. To avoid all of this I have decided to use the keyboard for 2 parameters, Pitch shift and Reverb.
The desktop version does not have this limitation, you can either control all the parameters using the sliders on the patch or connect a MIDI controller (with at least 7 knobs :)
While I have tried to stay true to the original design, I did do some refactoring and may have introduced some bugs. If you find any bug, annoyance, or functionality that deviates from marylou’s bird translator please send me a message, it’s all my fault!
Acknowledgements#
- marylou!
attackallmonstersfor their soft organelle.- Chris Dixon (la practica) (testing)
- Adrian Newton (Evergreen Music) (testing)
- Everyone on the C&G forum.