Lineage¶
Particle Chimes stands on open-source synthesizer DNA, and we want to be plain about where it comes from. Both halves of the engine, the ringing and the cloud, descend from Eurorack modules designed by Émilie Gillet of Mutable Instruments. She published her DSP code under the MIT license, and that is the reason instruments like this one can exist. The original sources live at github.com/pichenettes/eurorack.
Rings: the resonators¶
The resonator at the heart of Particle Chimes is a port of Rings, Mutable Instruments' modal resonator module (itself the resonator half of the larger Elements voice). All six of the instrument models in the sound browser are Rings models:
| Particle Chimes instrument | Rings model |
|---|---|
| Modal | Modal resonator |
| Sympathetic | Sympathetic strings |
| String | Modulated/inharmonic string |
| FM Voice | 2-op FM voice |
| Sympathetic (Quantized) | Quantized sympathetic strings (Western chords) |
| String + Reverb | String with reverb |
Studio's model stepper goes further still, into the six string-synth models from Rings' hidden "Easter egg" mode: the formant, chorus, ensemble, and reverb variants.
The exciter section in Studio (Friction, Hard, Level, and the character stepper) is ported from Elements, Rings' bigger sibling: the bow, blow, and strike generators that Elements uses to drive the same kind of resonator.
The alternate firmware: Mini-Elements¶
That pairing, Rings' resonator driven by Elements' exciters, had already been done on the hardware. Lyle Mills' alternate Rings firmware, widely known as Mini-Elements, gives Rings an internal exciter borrowed from Elements: exactly the combination Particle Chimes ships as its exciter section. It's discussed on the Mutable Instruments forum. The firmware's expanded chord tables are in here too: the VOICING chips on the Sympathetic (Quantized) model switch between Rings' original chords (CLASSIC) and the Jon Butler (BUTLER) and Joe McMullen (SHRUTI) tables from that firmware.
Clouds: the particles¶
The granular half is the PARTICLES engine, a buffer and three playheads descended from Clouds, Mutable Instruments' granular texture synthesizer. Sound goes into a rolling buffer, and a cloud of overlapping grains reads it back at different positions, sizes, densities, and pitches. Here the cloud listens to the resonators instead of an external input. If you've patched a Clouds, the Particles panel's Pos, Size, Dens, and Tex controls will feel familiar.
What's ours¶
The instrument around these engines is original Plastic Factory work: the Play and Studio surfaces, the performance ribbon, the AUTO player, Bloom and its parallel sustain layer, the delay, the tuning system, and every visualizer skin. The vendored Mutable Instruments code retains its MIT copyright notices in the app's source. Thank you, Émilie.