one to twenty cylinders · 09-08 23:30
Twenty engines, from a single-cylinder thumper to a twenty cylinder generator the size of a room. You are the ear in the middle of the yard: where an engine stands is how you hear it. Nothing here is a recording. Each one is built the way an engine actually makes its noise — one bang per cylinder per cycle, fired at the crank angles of that layout, through an exhaust that rings at its own fixed pitch. Which is why a five sounds like a five and a cross-plane eight burbles.
Silent. Sound needs one press — a browser only opens the speakers inside a tap.
Drag an engine to move it. Tap one to start or kill it. The yard is 14 by 10 metres.
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Off, or a beat for the whole yard. You never hear the pulse itself — you hear what obeys it. How much an engine obeys is its own Swing: left it revs when it feels like it, right it revs on the beat, and the further right the more the off-beats fall late.
Left is a lock-up with the door shut, right is an empty hall with concrete walls. The further an engine stands from you, the more of it reaches you as room rather than as engine.
A recording is what you hear, from the moment you press it. It lands as a file you can drop into anything.
The yard you leave behind is still here when you come back — where every engine stood, and how it was set.