Black Noise Releases

[BlackNoiseModular (Alex)]

Hey everyone!

I’m Alex, founder of Black Noise Modular. We’re super excited to finally join the VCV Rack community and introduce here! At Black Noise, we focus on creating innovative and unique modules that push the boundaries of sound design and empower musicians to explore new sonic possibilities.

Our hardware modules have been out there for a while, but today, I’m happy to share that our Black Noise modules are now available for free on VCV Rack! This is a big step for us in making our tools accessible to everyone, and we hope you’ll enjoy experimenting with them.

Feel free to reach out, share your experiences, or just say hi! Looking forward to seeing what the community does with our modules.

Grab your version of the COSMOS Bundle from the VCV Rack library And don’t miss the amazing video prepared by Omri Cohen Be sure to check out the dozens of patch ideas included in the manual

[gc3 (gc)]

Fantastic news! These are great modules and a welcome addition to Rack. Thanks so much for bringing them over (and making them in the first place!)

[BlackNoiseModular (Alex)]

Thanks! We’re really happy to have brought these modules to VCV, but we also have to give a shout-out to @pyer and @hemmer for their amazing work! Without their skills and effort, we wouldn’t have been able to create such faithful modules.

[Nik]

Wonderful news. I’m looking guiltily now at the Cosmos kit I bought from you in the summer but haven’t built yet. At least I’ll be able to hit the ground running with it when I do.

[BlackNoiseModular (Alex)]

It’s gonna be even harder to find the time to assemble the kit now that you can play with it on VCV!

[Cella (Victor Kashirin)]

Great modules, and thank you for opening the code!

[waldin.kano]

such an interesting module Cosmos is. and the manual is straight up artwork.

[gc3 (gc)]

@BlackNoiseModular

we also have to give a shout-out to @pyer and @hemmer for their amazing work!

You chose well

[hemmer (A Forest Full of Sines)]

Great to collaborate and see the modules finally out there. Just to mention where I think these add to the existing VCV ecosystem:

• COSMOS offers full set of logic outputs, oversampled, polyphonic suitable for audio rate applications, including derived gate outputs from analogue inputs (@DaveVenom’s Logic Module does the gate part of this very well ). Pressure pads respond more highly in the centre
• SlewLFO - a function generator with huge dynamic range, click (default empty) capacitor slot to slow things down
• GOMA II - chainable, smart polyphony handling (e.g. breaking normalling resets polyphony count)
• General - all polyphonic, beautiful to look at thanks to @pyer

[DaveVenom (Dave Benham)]

Thanks for the flowers @hemmer. I am excited to see another plugin tackle oversampling for logic operations of audio rate signals. The Venom WinComp can produce oversampled bandlimited Min/Max (analog AND/OR) as well.

During WinComp development I tried to figure out how analog XOR works, and couldn’t figure it out. WinComp has a Clamp output, but it is not “through zero” clamping, whatever that means, and so I suppose it does not quite do analog XOR.

I understand why Min is considered analog AND, and Max is analog OR. But I don’t get the reasoning behind why the through zero clamp is called analog XOR.

I want to make sure I understand the expected behavior. What I observe with Cosmos in VCV is the magnitude of the analog XOR output is the minimum magnitude of A and B. The sign of the output is negative if the signs of both A and B match, and positive output if the input signs differ. Is that correct?

I have a major concern about the gate/trigger outputs of the XOR and XNOR. The manual states that for any of the gate outputs, the output is high if the analog output is above 0V, and low otherwise. I can see that behavior with Min (AND) and Max (OR), though the threshold defaults to 1V, not 0V.

But I do not see that behavior with the XOR gates. For the life of me I cannot figure out the relationship between the analog XOR and the XOR gate. For example, I sometimes get negative analog XOR output, yet high XOR gate output. Is that a bug? or a documentation error? or am I misunderstanding something? I am testing on Windows.

One last thing - I love that all three modules are polyphonic. That is another thing I strive to support with Venom, and it is good to see that enhancement to the BlackNoiseModular clones. But the tags need to be updated to reflect that fact! Currently only GOMA is tagged as polyphonic. I worry that many people will miss out on the polyphonic possibilities without that tag.

Also, perhaps the manual link should point to the GitHub readme where it describes the differences between the VCV clones and the hardware, which I think is important info. That readme already includes a link to the hardware descriptions and manuals for the rest of the information.

[hemmer (A Forest Full of Sines)]

First of thanks for the detailed look at things always appreciated. To be honest, the XOR outputs confused me the most. There is a discussion on github where I was also confused but let me also summarise:

• XOR Gate: when the two signals are the “same”, gate out is zero otherwise high. “Same” is determined by a window comparator + threshold (settable in context)
  • This is probably technically a documentation issue (or could be at least clarified)
• The behaviour there is perhaps “opinionated” in that it maybe deviates from what you might expect, but it does at least acurately reproduce the hardware, and can lead to some interesting and playable rhythms/sounds. With gates in, gate out should definitely be XOR though, and for analogue XOR I believe it is slightly open to interpretation how that might work (as equality of non-binary signals isn’t straightforward).

@DaveVenom

the magnitude of the analog XOR output is the minimum magnitude of A and B. The sign of the output is negative if the signs of both A and B match, and positive output if the input signs differ. Is that correct?

Yes.

@DaveVenom

But the tags need to be updated to reflect that fact! Currently only GOMA is tagged as polyphonic. I worry that many people will miss out on the polyphonic possibilities without that tag.

I don’t know how I missed that, they’ve been polyphonic from the start! Thanks

@DaveVenom

Also, perhaps the manual link should point to the GitHub readme where it describes the differences between the VCV clones and the hardware, which I think is important info. That readme already includes a link to the hardware descriptions and manuals for the rest of the information.

Good idea!

[auxmux]

Had a first go with Cosmos. Digging it, lots of possibilities.

[DaveVenom (Dave Benham)]

@hemmer

First of thanks for the detailed look at things always appreciated. To be honest, the XOR outputs confused me the most. There is a discussion on github where I was also confused but let me also summarise:

• XOR Gate: when the two signals are the “same”, gate out is zero otherwise high. “Same” is determined by a window comparator + threshold (settable in context)
  • This is probably technically a documentation issue (or could be at least clarified)
• The behaviour there is perhaps “opinionated” in that it maybe deviates from what you might expect, but it does at least acurately reproduce the hardware, and can lead to some interesting and playable rhythms/sounds. With gates in, gate out should definitely be XOR though, and for analogue XOR I believe it is slightly open to interpretation how that might work (as equality of non-binary signals isn’t straightforward).

Thank you - that helps immensely!

So it is true that the XOR gate output does not directly correlate with the XOR “clipped” output. But it does correlate with the difference output!

I am able to compute the XOR gate output as if |X - Y| > threshold then high else low.

The difference is computed as (X - Y) / 2

So the XOR gate is high if |difference| > threshold / 2

My Venom WinComp can compute the same XOR gate output by patching X into A and Y into B, both with no offset, and setting the tolerance to 1V. The XOR gates will be output at the X<>Y output. And that supports oversampling, just like Cosmos. As you already pointed out, the Venom Logic can produce the oversampled OR and AND gate outputs. But the Venom Logic XOR output will not match Cosmos.

[andreya.ek.frisk]

Very cool. Thanks for these!

[hemmer (A Forest Full of Sines)]

@DaveVenom

One last thing - I love that all three modules are polyphonic. That is another thing I strive to support with Venom, and it is good to see that enhancement to the BlackNoiseModular clones. But the tags need to be updated to reflect that fact! Currently only GOMA is tagged as polyphonic. I worry that many people will miss out on the polyphonic possibilities without that tag.

Latest release adds missing polyphonic tags, thanks for spotting