Phasing and Lfos. Huh.

I came across this the other day, harmonic motion phasing polyrhythm fun and having made my own experiments of that kind a fairly long time ago I wanted to give it a shot in VCV. First instinct was to set up a bunch of clocks, all with 1 or 2 bpm difference:

… which worked very well, short video with oscilloscope shenanigans here. Things phase out of each other, but relations, patterns and rhythms emerge, until the cycles complete in a way that all triggers meet again.

But I wanted to use an LFO, which I had used back then: feed a spread of equidistant values to make it go at different speeds which eventually relate to each other. And I’m thinking that should be straightforward. An input of 1 v/oct makes it twice as fast as 0, so I if I do this…

image

… it should do trick, but it doesn’t. Starts off nicely, screenshot is just after the reset, but it kind of falls apart after a short while. There are absolutely no patterns in the audio and I have two of Count Modula’s polyphonic utilities in the patch - those leds scream Random.

So I’m wondering if I maybe not quite understand how an LFO’s v/oct input relates to its frequency or what else is going on. Which is including possible brainfarts.

Reminds me a bit of the module in testing right now, Phase Patterns.would it help here?

It would not answer the question why this is not working.

True enough, it would not do that. But it is a module that generates this kind of stuff with less effort, I think. But something for another time.

The people who commented on that youtube video don’t seem to know that this “genre” is called “phase music”, and it all goes back to the 60’s, if not earlier.

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The clock frequencies have equidistant intervals.

But your LFOs are equidistant intervals between voltage. There is a log relationship between voltage and frequency. So they are very different.

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So this :wink:

I’ll do some math then, tomorrow and report back!

There are other videos with a software’s overlay. If “Lucid Rhythm” made that, props to them, but yes, I share that sentiment. Still, with the visual component, those are nice to watch.

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Try the Nano modules ONA oscillator. It can be put in LFO mode, and it has the option for linear FM. I think you will get your desired result with equidistant voltages as long as the oscillator is using linear FM

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Not what you’re after, cheating, only 5 notes etc. but I got inspired and had some fun with this one.

Delay play.vcv (8.7 KB)

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I found a module that can convert a linear scale into a logarithmic one, but. But. I guess the fundamental problem is that I don’t know how or where to read the relationship of v/oct inpout and the resulting change of hz, outside of a full 1v.

But the reason behind using a LFO was to have one. ONA is monophonic…


But then again, I just plugged a VST piano into the whole thing and screw phasing shmasing :wink:

Yeah - I discovered the unfortunate fact about the ONO after I posted that. I don’t think the sync works properly either.

I managed to accomplish the goal with a single VCV LFO. The LFO is set to 1 Hz = 60 BPM as the baseline.

My Venom Mix 4 outputs 60 V to match, and then Recurse adds 2V (2 BPM) 15 times to get 16 voltages ranging from 60 to 90. The docB Formula One performs the Log2(x) to get the absolute voltage, and then subtracts the voltage of the baseline log2(60) to get the relative voltage needed for each LFO channel.

The Catronomix vcClk modules measure the observed BPM for the first and last LFO channels, verifying all the math worked out. Note that even though it displays 2 decimal places, it actually rounds to the nearest integer. So it does not work well for fractional BPM values.

It takes 30 seconds (30 beats of the 60 BPM channel) to cycle back to the unison point. I use the Count Modula countdown timer to force a LFO reset, just in case there is any drift.

LFO Phasing.vcv (2.8 KB)

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Ah nice, thanks! So I’d had almost been there!

Well, that was neat, with a cool visualization. :+1: