Hanoi's Voice

A spectral delay driven by a Tower of Hanoi puzzle.

Hanoi's Voice splits your sound into frequency bands and gives each band its own echo. Each band is also a disk in a Tower of Hanoi puzzle, and each peg is a place in the stereo field.

The plugin plays the puzzle out move by move. When a disk moves to another peg, that band's echo moves with it, and a trail of the echo lingers where it was. Small disks are the high bands and move often. Large disks are the low bands and move rarely; the largest moves once in a full solution. So the top of the sound skitters around the field while the bottom shifts slowly underneath it.

There is no LFO or random generator behind the movement. The order of moves is the puzzle's own solution, so it is the same every time, and it takes long enough to finish that it does not sound like a loop.

What it sounds like

At the default settings it is a delay whose echoes are split by pitch and spread across the field: a plucked line comes back as a scatter of repeats, each at its own place and time. High bands echo sooner and low bands later.

Turn up Texture and the echoes break into overlapping grains, and further up pitch-shifted copies start to appear, a fifth or an octave or two away. Turn up Feedback and the echoes regenerate until the sound almost holds still. Turn up Motion and the puzzle runs faster, so the bands trade places more often.

Working with it

Six controls are always on screen, and they cover most of what the plugin does.

Motion sets how fast the puzzle plays. At the middle it makes about two moves a second. Turning it down slows that to a quarter, and turning it up makes it four times faster.

Texture breaks the echoes into grains. Low is a clean delay. From about 60 percent up, pitch-shifted ghosts join in, and near the top there are many of them.

Size sets the grain length, from 20 milliseconds to two seconds. Short grains sound like a stutter; long ones like smeared repeats.

Position sets where in the delay buffer the grains read from, so it moves the grains earlier or later in time.

Feedback is how much of each echo comes back around. Near the top the echoes pile up until the sound nearly freezes, and the bands start to bleed into each other.

Blend is the dry/wet balance.

Under Advanced is the structure of the puzzle itself: how many disks (bands) and pegs (places), how the bands are spaced, the shortest and longest echo, and how the pegs are laid out in the field. Changing the number of disks or pegs changes the puzzle, and the plugin can keep the current positions, start over, or reseed.

The display

The tower view is drawn from the live state of the audio, once per block. Each disk is one band, colored from cool for the low bands to warm for the high ones, and it glows with that band's actual level. The disk that moves next lifts and flashes before it goes. A readout shows how many moves have been made, the size of the puzzle and which disk is next.

Below it, an output meter shows the level, and a mode chip shows whether the plugin is running in stereo or in B-format.

Demos

Rendered straight from the plugin with no other processing. The source sounds were synthesized for these demos.

• Default settings on a plucked line
  Each band's echo steps across the stereo field as the puzzle plays out.

• High motion on the same line
  The puzzle solves about four times faster, so the echoes jump between left, center and right much more often.

• High texture on a pad
  The echoes broken into overlapping grains.

• High feedback on drums
  The echoes feed back and pile up until the sound nearly freezes.

The editor

Parameters

Presets

Seventeen, in six groups.

Requirements