Birbs

Overview

Birbs is an Organelle port of marylou sharrock’s bird translator.

A couple of months ago she donated one of her translators to
This Museum Is Not Obsolete and I immediately fell in love with it.
Sadly I did not have any Bela boards so I couldn’t build my own, but I found
the zine where she describes the machine in detail and grabbed
the Pure Data patch. Soon after I had a version running on my laptop.

Then it dawned on me I have a couple of machines capable of running Pure Data,
and that I might as well port it to one of those, so I wouldn’t need my laptop
and I would have more direct control over the parameters - and here we are!

Installation

  1. Load the zop file onto the SD card or USB drive.
  2. Reload the storage.
  3. Select “Install Birbs.zop”

Dependencies

The bird translator depends on the ipoke~ object, which I have included
in the installation package. If you don’t trust binaries from a random stranger
on the Internet, you will need to download and compile ipoke~ yourself.
The resulting ipoke~.pd_linux file must be placed in the Birbs folder.

Platform

I am running Pure Data on macOS, and my Organelle is an original model running
OS 4.0.

Unfortunately I am unable to test this on the M or S models, and thus I will be
unable to help with or fix any issues related to this. If you have an Organelle
M or S and would like to help testing Birbs, get in touch, please!

Controls

You will need a microphone capable of working with the Organelle (I use
Critter & Guitari’s Microphone, but any microphone you use with the Organelle
should do it). You can of course feed Birbs any audio.

Knobs

  • Knob 1: Speed
  • Knob 2: Gap
  • Knob 3: Delay
  • Knob 4: Feedback

Lower octave keys

  • C: Recording
  • D: Stop
  • E: Play

Higer octave keys

  • C to B (white keys): Pitch shifter
  • C# to A# (black keys): Reverb amount

Code

This project is maintained on GitHub.

Closing remarks

My initial thoughts were to use the Aux button as a modifier for the knobs,
so that all parameters could be controlled using the Organelle’s knobs - the
bird translator has more parameters than the Organelle has knobs.

However, I really dislike multi-page setups when using knobs, as you either
have to store and recall the values for every page, or your knobs will be
in the wrong position as you move between pages. To avoid all of this I have
decided to use the keyboard for 2 parameters, Pitch shift and Reverb.

While I have tried to stay true to the original design, I did do some
refactoring and may have introduced some bugs. If you find any bug, annoyance,
or functionality that deviates from marylou’s bird translator please send me
a message, it’s all my fault!

TODO

  1. Export sounds
  2. Release desktop version

Acknowledgements

References

6 Likes

nice but what does it do? :smiley: is there a video of this organelle version or the one in the museum somewhere?

Im testing it on my Organelle original v4.0 and Im getting this error: “warning: 1009-comp” multiply defined. It repeat the error 12 times at startup or when I press the first E key from the left and results in an audio i/o error.

@pepper Thank you for reporting this, I’m tracking it here.

I’m not really a video person :slight_smile:
Here’s marylou with the original bird translator:

1 Like

Hi @pfig! This is truly fantastic and I absolutely love this - thanks a lot for porting to the Organelle!
I have tested this on my Organelle M and got the “Installation failed” errors as others reported on patchstorage.

Here’s a quick fix to make this work on Organelle M/S:

  1. Rename file extension from .zop to .zip
  2. Extract zip file on your computer
  3. Remove the files manifest.txt and deploy.sh from the folder
  4. Zip the folder
  5. Upload to your Organelle M/S and follow the usual install routine

Thank you for the kind words, @twang69.

I’m afraid I don’t know what’s going on with the installation, 2 friends of mine who have an M with OS 4.0 didn’t have any issues :frowning:
I might try deleting the deploy script (it’s not doing anything atm).

Tracked here.

Cheers!

1 Like

I don’t know much about .zop files either. This post might give some answers though: Installing .zip vs .zop - #2 by thetechnobear - I’m assuming it’s some issue with the manfifest.txt file. As mentioned, providing it as a zip file and leaving out the deploy.sh and manifest.txt file worked well for me on OS 4.2