How it thinks

Beat clock and clock modes

Mode

Tempo from

Use for

INT

this device: tap the beat display or TAP

vinyl, a lone laptop

EXT

the beat analyser, listening

music fed to the analyser

PIO

the Pro DJ Link tempo master

CDJs, or StemDeck as master

Details: Beat Analyzer. In EXT and PIO the device counts on between beats and eases onto each one; if beats stop, it keeps the last tempo and slowly drifts. The clock is set only on the clock key (or panel clock), never saved in a set, since every booth differs: check it at soundcheck. The rec mode isn’t saved in a set either.

When the device comes up

Start-up never moves the room: Motion asks Core where every sound is and takes the answer before sending anything. It waits up to 10 s for Core’s address file, so its window opens once with the right addresses (no announcement: the file on disk; a later change restarts it; truth).

Loading a set is the opposite: the set wins. It stops everything, sets 3d, freq and Q, and restarts what the set says was playing, together, on the next downbeat. Shipped sets say nothing was playing; PLAY all starts them.

How a shape sits on the sphere

  • The shape is a flat disc wrapped over the room. elv sets its top: it spreads downwards from there, as far as reach says (upwards with a negative reach), and its very middle runs to the nearer pole.

  • Past clip-top or clip-bot a point keeps its direction and loses height, so a shape travels around a ceiling.

  • rot goes all the way round; a stopped spin leaves the shape where it is.

  • The squeeze belongs to the shape: a squeezed circle spins as an ellipse.

Touch, Latch, Write

Recording loops inside the take’s length, each pass over the last. The rec mode (in its own colour) says how much a pass replaces — as in DAW automation:

Mode

What it does

Use it for

Touch

changes only where your finger is

drawing, fixing a corner

Latch

after a touch, holds your last spot for the rest of the pass

parking a sound

Write

replaces one pass, then overdubs like Touch

starting clean

Draw in Touch, not Latch: in Latch, lifting halfway parks the rest of the pass. A take is the last finished pass; lanes use the same mode. While you record, the old path stays drawn faintly underneath.

Coming from REAPER: Touch is REAPER’s Touch, without a glide back on release. Latch is REAPER’s Latch with reset latch on loop on. Write differs: REAPER wipes every pass; Motion wipes only the first, so a forgotten take is never erased down to one spot.

How actions play

  • The accent rises (atk, bars) while the pad is held, holds, and falls (dec) on release: your finger is the sustain. On 3d, the channel-row knob shows the floor and the filled arc the accent. After the fall the clip does its END-ACTION once.

  • Hold lasts while the pad is down; 1shot runs its course alone.

  • Relative: worked out at the press against the clip as it is, so half hits harder on a wide clip.

  • Random once, when assigned; then the same every time. Reassign to reroll.

  • Chains: when an accent ends, then fires its button as a one-shot. Chains may loop; stop with another pad, Play|Pause or ■.

  • Two at once: the last press wins; afterwards the clip returns to itself.

  • A set only names actions; the script decides what they do, everywhere.

Why the screen is not optional

The screen is the instrument: menus, lists and the bar need touch. Treat it like your CDJ screens; keep drinks away.

How a movement feels

The library is built on how moving sound is heard:

  • Speed carries energy. Faster turns and tempo-locked cycles read as more energetic; long, slow cycles as calm.

  • Height carries lift. Up and overhead reads as open and bright, low and under the floor as heavy and dark.

  • Coming closer raises the tension. Sound that approaches is heard as more arousing than sound that recedes, above all when it is already dark.

  • Smooth or angular. Circles, roses and Lissajous figures read as pleasant; corners, zigzags and sudden jumps as tense.

The vocabulary the shapes and actions are made from:

  • Smalley’s motion typology. Rising and falling, oscillation, rotation around a centre, flying out from it or into it, dilation and contraction, vortex.

  • Rhythm cells. The four-to-the-floor kick, the off-beat hi-hat, the tresillo (3+3+2) that EDM builds its tension on, the son clave in both directions, the shuffle and the gallop. A position that jumps on their sixteenths grooves in space.

  • Dub. The desk as instrument: throws into the delay, repeats that fall away, filter sweeps, spring reverb, reversed tape.

  • Build-up, drop, breakdown. The build widens, rises and opens the filter; the drop releases it all at once; the breakdown strips it back.

The research behind it

  • Russell’s circumplex model of affect, and the Mood Meter built on it;

  • studies of approaching and receding sound (Tajadura-Jiménez et al., Embodied auditory perception, 2010);

  • the mapping of pitch and height;

  • Denis Smalley’s Spectromorphology (1997);

  • Stockhausen’s work with rotating sound, which found that past about sixteen rotations a second, movement stops being heard as movement at all;

  • dub and dance-music production practice.