433 Sense of Space

A whimsical loop card for the Music Thing Workshop Computer, inspired by John Cage's 4'33": a small fragment of theatre ambience is looped for about 91 seconds and placed in imaginary performance spaces.

It is not silence. It is the room, the audience, the building, and the slightly ridiculous act of listening very hard.

Controls

The card powers up armed rather than playing. Move the switch Up to stop, reset the audio position, clear the reverb tail, and relight the three countdown LEDs. Move the switch to Middle to begin a complete 4'33" performance: three passes through the 91 second ambience loop, then automatic stop and mute. Moving the switch Down during a performance, or sending a rising edge to Pulse In 1, triggers the chair/stool creak one-shot; returning to Middle does not restart the performance while it is already running. Sending a rising edge to Pulse In 2 restarts the three-loop performance immediately, as if the card had been stopped/armed and then started again.

The creak is intentionally quiet and sits behind the room ambience, as if the performer has shifted slightly rather than knocked over the furniture.

Main adds a little unattended human presence. Fully anticlockwise keeps the card manual-only: creaks happen only from Switch Down or Pulse In 1. Turning Main up allows occasional automatic creaks during the three-loop performance, with shorter random waits as the knob is turned clockwise.

Automatic restlessness waits for about 20 seconds after the performance starts before the first possible fidget. At maximum restlessness, automatic creaks are spaced by roughly 5-15 seconds; lower settings stretch the random waits toward about 90 seconds. Automatic creaks play at 25% gain, while manual/Pulse-triggered creaks play at 37.5% gain, so the unattended fidgets still sit slightly farther back in the room.

Outputs

LEDs

The left column is a simple 4'33" countdown. Three LEDs are lit before playing and at the start of the performance. One LED goes out after each 91 second loop. After the third loop, the card stops and the audio mutes.

The right column glows dimly while the performance is running.

Builds

This stable version has both 2 MB and 16 MB builds:

The two builds use the same code, controls, LED countdown, reverb, restlessness automation, loop length, 2 second loop crossfade, and chair creak one-shot. The only intentional difference is the ambience sample format:

The UF2 files are larger than their flash payloads because UF2 adds block metadata. The flash payload inside each UF2 is the relevant storage size.

The 16 MB UF2 can take much longer to copy/flash than the 2 MB UF2. This is normal: the higher-quality 16-bit ambience makes the UF2 wrapper substantially larger even though the actual flash payload still fits comfortably on a 16 MB card.

CC0 Mayakovsky Version

A separate copyright-clean version is included in mayakovsky_cc0/. It uses a Creative Commons 0 Mayakovsky Theatre audience recording from approximately 4:45-6:16, avoiding speech heard around 6:25, while keeping the same controls, LED countdown, pulse inputs, restlessness behaviour, reverb, and chair creak.

The main BBC-derived version remains the preferred sound for the card: its audience perspective is more intimate, as if heard from the stage during a performance. The Mayakovsky CC0 version is more spacious and public-sounding, but has simpler reuse terms because all embedded ambience and chair creak audio is CC0.

Mayakovsky CC0 UF2s:

Pulse Input

Pulse In 1 triggers the chair/stool creak on a rising edge. It retriggers the same one-shot used by Switch Down, with no extra audio data. Pulse-triggered creaks use the same level as Switch Down creaks, so they are more deliberate than the quieter automatic restlessness fidgets.

Pulse In 2 restarts the full 4'33" performance from the beginning. It resets the loop position, relights the three countdown LEDs, clears the reverb tail, starts playback immediately, and restarts the 20 second restlessness grace period.

Seat Creak Candidate

Selected candidate: https://freesound.org/people/unkleceeg/sounds/276473/

Chair creaking back and forth 01.wav by unkleceeg, licensed Creative Commons 0. The one-shot currently baked into the firmware is a 1.35 second stereo signed 8-bit 12 kHz excerpt from around 7.95 seconds in the original WAV. It is mixed into the dry loop before the reverb, so it appears inside the selected performance space.

Licence And Source Audio

See LICENSE for the mixed-license terms covering this folder.

The embedded ambience is derived from BBC Sound Effects Archive item 07003043 (bbc_theatres--_07003043). BBC Sound Effects licensing allows archive sounds to be used "for non-commercial, personal or research purposes", or licensed separately for other uses: https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/licensing

Because the UF2 files include that BBC-derived audio, the complete firmware images are not offered as a general Creative Commons release. Any public, commercial, or otherwise non-personal use should be checked against the BBC terms or covered by a separate BBC licence.

Technical Notes

The source is baked into the firmware as a 91 second stereo signed 8-bit loop taken from 1:30-3:01 of BBC Sound Effects Archive item 07003043. Playback is linearly interpolated to the Workshop Computer's 48 kHz audio rate, then sent through the integer Dattorro-style reverb from Reverb+. The X control deliberately avoids the near-freeze end of the reverb algorithm so the largest setting remains musical rather than turning the quiet ambience into noise.