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Gestures

Reflecting on all the ways we've interacted with Atrium so far, there are so many compelling sidequests inside a simple slider flick or a knob twist. Worlds are revealed, obscured, remade. To cap off the gestural section of the Player's Manual (and before we get into creating persistent Systems), we invite you to eschew absolute truth in favor of ephemeral gonzo recording.

The final boss of On Gestures: gestures themselves. Five temporary sketch pads for movement.

Basics

Conceptually it's easiest to think of gestures as tiny loopers of your manual articulations. When you find a motion you like the sound of, you can capture it as you play, and have it repeated ad infinitum. With a single press, playback can be stopped, then pressed to restart again. All gestures can play at once, but it's fun to use them as alternating motifs with different groups. Of course there's more to it, but this is a good mental model to start your exploration.

Keep in mind that the timing of gestures is directly linked to the clock (and thus the tempo knob). Before continuing, be sure that tempo is not at the minimum, and you're seeing the metronome happily tick away.

Recording

  • To begin recording, press one of the five white gesture keys. Recording begins immediately!
  • Interact with Atrium's parameters.
  • To stop recording, press the same gesture key. Playback begins the moment you stop recording.
  • To stop, press the same gesture key.
  • To restart playback, press it again!

Presently only knobs & sliders are captured by gestures. This will change in future.

Clearing

To clear a gesture, hold clear and press the corresponding gesture. The gesture can be playing while this occurs; Atrium will simply reset the parameter to its current panel value.

Modifiers

By default, each gesture runs asynchronously and for a free, unquantized duration. There are five modifiers available which change different facets of each gesture beyond its default behavior. This is where the black gesture key comes into play - again the black key acting as a shift key for controlling others.

The currently selected gesture recording is indicated below the black key. Anytime you interact with a gesture's white key, it will be selected for editing. If you want to select a different gesture, tap the black gesture key.

With the desired channel selected, hold the black key, and press the white key corresponding to the desired modifier.

step

step quantizes playback of the events in the loop; the recording buffer is sampled once per clock pulse, then held until the next pulse. When enabled, step adds the feeling of “sample and hold” to continuous parameter adjustments, adding a rhythmic effect to the motions.

Beware though! These updates won't magically be linked to the clock's phase. Instead the sampling happens in terms of the gesture's duration. A recording that is 3.5 beats long will have an irregular pulse to the steps. This can be used to creative rhythmic effect, or see the len and beat modifiers for a more rigid effect.

len

len quantizes the duration of the loop to a multiple of clock pulses. This is not a pre-fixed number; rather, len reflects the duration of each loop but snapped to the beat. For example, two len-quantized loops can be fourteen and fifteen pulses long, respectively. This creates a feeling of cohesion between multiple running loops.

  • When recording with len enabled, you’ll see that your ‘stop recording’ press is quantized to the next beat. This means that the loop’s length is baked into the recording, and will always be an integer multiple of clock pulses.
  • When playing a freeform recording back with len enabled, the timing is compressed downward, playing slightly faster so all the events are executed within the allotted time.

beat

beat quantizes the gesture key’s presses to the next clock pulse.

  • When recording with beat enabled, you’ll see that your ‘start recording’ press is quantized to the next clock pulse. When combined with len, this allows for classic beat-based looping, where the start and end of the loop are perfectly in-sync with the clock’s pulse.
  • When playing back with only beat enabled, your ‘start playing’ press is quantized to the next clock pulse. Your ‘end playing’ press is still immediate.

beat and len are two sides of the quantization coin. If you're looking to create loops with tight synchronization, it's best to turn them both on.

scan

scan compresses event playback to the duration of a single clock pulse. This is useful for creating your own uniquely-shaped modulators and is a fun way to remix and recycle your recorded gestures. If beat isn't enabled and you launch playback with scan, you’ll see that the playhead ‘picks up’ wherever it is in the phase between clock pulses; enabling beat will ensure that scan's playback waits for the next clock pulse to start playing.

link is useful to synchronize multiple gestures together, driving the playback of the target gesture from the playhead of a source gesture. The same gesture can be used to drive the playback of multiple others, allowing for different depths and dimensions of interdependency.

To link a gesture to another:

  • Select the target gesture whose playback you want to affect by pressing the black gesture key until the target's number is listed.
  • Then hold the black key and press link (you can now release the black key if you wish)
  • The link light will flash, and a light bar will appear above the currently selected link source. By default, this will be the target's own channel.
  • Press the gesture key of the source; the one you’d like to drive this playhead. The interface will automatically exit upon selection.
  • If you hold the black key again, you’ll see a pulsing light bar above the linked playhead source.
  • To clear the link, and return to normal playback control, hold the black key and press link. The pulsing light bar will disappear.

Some notes about link:

  • When a gesture uses the playhead from another to drive its playback, all of its events are compressed or expanded to the timing of the source playhead. This also means that the target gesture's key no longer controls its playback, since that is taken from its source playhead.
  • If a linked playhead has any timing modifiers enabled (len, beat, scan), those will affect the playback of the target gesture. For example, if you link gesture[2] to take its playhead from gesture[1], and gesture[1] has beat and scan enabled, then gesture[2] will also wait for the next clock pulse to begin playback and its events will be compressed to the duration of a single clock pulse.
  • We can also complect our linking! For example, we can link gesture[2] to take its playhead from gesture[1], but we can also link gesture[3] to take its playhead from gesture[2]. What’s fun is that this doesn’t mean that gesture[1] is now driving both gesture[2] and gesture[3] — rather, gesture[2]’s original playhead is now driving gesture[3]! It's a great way to manipulate the timing of gestures beyond simply scaling them all up or down with tempo.

The gesture section's interface is utilized in numerous other ways through the instrument, which will all be covered in the following section (On Systems):