Wave-Table Oscillators as Signal Synthesis

We begin by translating numerical datasets into wave-table oscillators with Max’s gen~. This shift literalizes a movement from analysis to synthesis: from abstraction to embodied sense-making. Participants will sonify “brutalized” data, rendering waveforms not as mute graphs but as audible and affective signals—either directly as sound or indirectly as control signals driving beat slicers and sequencers.

SP-404 as Machine for Spectral Drift

These signals are then gathered into the Roland SP-404. Its architecture of resampling and effects invites intentional misalignment—pitch, time, harmonic expectation—echoing the expressive “offness” of the blue note. Participants will “play the error,” bending signals into spectral textures that drift across convention, discovering resonance in dissonance

TR-8S as Machine for Metric Dissensus

From these errant fragments, we construct break beats on the Roland TR-8S, refusing the metric consensus of gridlocked time. Here, we operationalize dissensus: building polymetric sequences in which divergent meters clash and converge. Multiple time signatures overlap, rub, and drift. Participants sequence breaks that disorient expectation, shift rhythmic emphasis, and generate emergent, relational grooves.

Feedback Loops as Ring Shouts

As the system unfolds, we entangle Max, SP-404, and TR-8S in a feedback ecology. Audio, modulation, and control-rate signals circulate between nodes. MIDI and CV connections transform the performance into a ring shout structure: participants respond to a signal (call) by transforming it through filters, LFOs, pitch effects, or spatial modulation (response). As these gestures accumulate and rebound, roles dissolve—listener becomes player, player becomes modulator, and knowledge emerges through relational resonance.

Naming the Data Otherwise

Drawing upon Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun, each session will include a collective effort to generate new languages for describing the datasets in play. Just as Eshun identifies breakbeat producers, instrumental turntablists, and mixadelic engineers as already-operating sonic theorists—activating thought at the speed of sound—we approach our datasets not as fixed objects to be analyzed, but as conceptual engines to be misused, mutated, and magnified.

These datasets are not neutral substrates but “thoughtprobes,” pregnant with potential, waiting to be switched on and re-coded through the languages of our own making. Participants will draw on the vocabularies of Black sonic innovation—skratchadelia, loopdelics, machine funk—as conceptual technics, as names that refuse empiricism’s closure and invite diffraction, drift, and misuse. Like track subtitles or stolen sleeve-note manifestos, these names will misrecognize the data in productive ways, distorting and bending it until it becomes a device for drilling into emergent sensory and epistemic states. Theory, here, does not impose from above—it is conducted from below, by way of machines, signals, samples, and the speculative vocabularies they demand.