a page about frequency
An atlas of things that come back: from the Sun’s slow cycle to the light inside a leaf, measured in octaves of A, 440 Hz.
climb the ladder ↓Everything vibrates. Matter is light, light is frequency, colour is frequency. A percussion polyrhythm, sped up, becomes a chord; a solar cycle is, at some point, an LFO.
This synth and this system are about that: how frequencies relate in nature, from the slowest to the fastest, and how much of it a synthesizer already uses. The unit is the octave: twice as fast. The reference is A, 440 Hz.
Each rung is an octave: twice as fast. A 440 Hz is rung zero. A day sits 25 octaves below it; visible light about 40 above, and it fills exactly one octave. Drag, zoom, tap a point.
Sound is moving air; light is an electromagnetic field. They are different things, but cycles per second are counted the same way, and doubling them is always an octave.
Three pulses in the ratio 4:5:6. Slow, it is a polyrhythm: you can count it. Fast, you can’t count it anymore and the ear fuses it into pitch: a major triad. Between the two there is no border, only speed. DRUM-X’s polyrhythms and the sequencer’s ratchets are chords played very slowly.
One oscillator moves another. Slowly, it is an LFO: tremolo, vibrato, a breath. Push the rate past about 20 Hz and the movement stops sounding like movement: new frequencies appear on both sides of the tone (sidebands) and the timbre changes. That is FM synthesis. JIANT’s FM6 engine is six oscillators talking like this.
Double 440 Hz forty times and you reach 484 THz: light of 620 nm, orange-red. Visible light spans exactly one octave (400–800 THz), so every note has one colour, and only one. It is a game of octaves, not physics: a note does not glow. But the ratio is the same: an octave is a doubling, in air and in light.
Look how the octave closes like a colour wheel: violet sits next to red.
The sun rises and sets once every 24 h: 11.6 µHz. Speed it up octave by octave. At 16 octaves it is a slow LFO (0.76 Hz) breathing on a drone; at 25 it sounds by itself (388 Hz, close to a G). The shape stays the same; only the scale changes. The Sun’s 11-year cycle, 32 octaves up, is a 12 Hz LFO.
Six operators, 32 algorithms: each one an oscillator that moves the frequency of another. What plate III does with two, FM6 does with six, and it reads DX7 banks.
A drum kit on the edge of pitch: polyrhythms, ratchets and X-MOD’s tempo-locked LFO. Play a roll fast enough and it stops being a roll: it becomes a tone.
The firmware looks at sound the way we look at nature: through a microscope (the creatures on HOME), with a thermal camera (their heat ramp, the palette of the infrared your body emits) and as a spectrum.
From sunlight to the A of a keyboard there are forty rungs. They are all the same gesture: something that comes back.