One live input, sent by hand into whichever of four tape
memories you choose. The moment you move on, it starts forgetting
itself — until it's silent, and ready to hold something new.
forgetful v0.5.4 · audio_fx · requires schwung
What it is
One input, four memories
Forgetful holds four independent memories, A through D. Each one
can record a loop from whatever's feeding into the module, then plays
it back on its own — coming apart a little more with every pass,
until it's silent and empty again.
The wearing-out is real, not a fade laid over the top. Each time
round, what comes off the tape is written back onto it, so the next
pass reads the damaged version and damages it again. Set a knob and
leave it: the loop keeps going further, because the damage compounds
on itself.
The controls sit on seven pages. Main is where you choose
which memory is listening and set how fast each plays. Sound
is level and tone for all four at once. Then one page each for
Loop A through Loop D, where you shape how that memory
falls apart — and Glitch at the end, which stutters the whole
thing.
The jog steps page to page; a click with no knob held opens the
page list, so you can jump straight to one.
Send → Rec → plays & comes apart → silent
Setup
Load it into a chain slot
Forgetful is in the Schwung module catalog, so the Module Store
installs and updates it for you: open move.local:7700, find
Forgetful, install. Needs Schwung 0.12.1 or newer. If you'd rather
do it by hand — for development, or with no network — the
repo
has the commands.
It never saves its settings. Forgetful comes up
at its defaults every time, in every set — no autosave, and nothing
restored from a saved project. A take is a performance; a loop handed
back three days later already half eaten isn't a starting point. The
cost is that Schwung's User Presets and chain patches can't capture this
module either.
There's help on the device too. Global Settings
→ Updates → Help → Modules → Forgetful has a short version of this page,
readable on the Move without a screen in front of you.
It's audio_fx, chainable — drop it into any
Signal Chain fx slot. No setup, no external files: turn Send to A, press
Rec, and it's catching.
Screen — page 1 of 7
Main
The page you land on: which memory is listening, what all four are
doing, and how fast each one runs. Click a control to see what it does.
Send
Points the live input at A, B, C or D. Only that one can hear you; the other three keep playing, aging or sitting empty exactly as they were.
The letter sits in a ring with a dot running the inside of it, at that memory's own speed and in its own direction — so the four speed knobs underneath are visible in the cell above them. The ring is the lap: one pass wipes it away behind the dot, the next lays it back down. An empty memory's ring is whole and still, with no dot; a frozen one's dot stops where it is.
ECHO
All four memories at once, a tank each in A B C D order. Each one fills with how much of that memory is left, and carries its own character inside — a digit, or R recording, O overdubbing, F frozen, a dash for empty. The character is drawn as a negative: lit while the tank below it is dark, dark once the fill has risen past it, so it stays readable at every level and the boundary crossing it is itself part of the reading.
Two things at once, on two channels that don't fight: the fill is how much is left, the letter is what it is doing. That is why a recording loop and a nearly-gone one can be told apart at a glance rather than by squinting at a code. R, O and F leave the tank empty on purpose — the code carries no level for those three, and filling it would be inventing a number.
Underneath it is still a four-character code — 9F-1 is A near full, B frozen, C empty, D nearly gone — and that is what a Schwung older than 1.2 shows, since drawing this picture is something only 1.2 lets a module do. The digit counts 9 down to 1, then a dash, and never 0: 0 and O are the same shape in this font, and a memory one tick from death should not look like one being overdubbed. The bars have no such problem, which is the point of them.
REC
One knob, four stages, each press moving to the next. Press to start recording; press again to stop, and it begins playing and wearing out; press while it plays to overdub, layering onto what's there without erasing it or resetting how far it has gone; press again to stop overdubbing. The readout names what the next press does. Since Schwung 1.0 a turn of the knob fires it as well as a click — a whole flick counts as one press.
Freeze
Stops that memory wearing out — it keeps looping exactly as ruined as it is, indefinitely. Nothing is written back onto the tape while it's frozen, so it holds. Press again to let it carry on. The readout names what it's doing now: FROZEN or AGING.
Speed
Four knobs, one per memory, eight speeds each. 1x is home. Turning left steps 1/2x, 1/4x, 2x; turning right runs the tape backwards — -1x, -1/2x, -1/4x, -2x.
Changes glide over five seconds rather than jumping, and a change of direction glides through zero: the tape slows, stops, and picks up backwards, the way a real one would. Going from 1x to -1x is five seconds of the loop grinding to a halt and running back the other way.
A slowed memory also comes apart more slowly, because the damage happens per pass, not per second — half speed is also a way to preserve one.
Turning one raises a card while you hold it: a ladder of the four rates with the chosen one picked out, and an arrow under it for which way the tape is running. Reverse is a direction, and a minus sign is a poor way to say so.
Screen — page 2 of 7
Sound
Level over tone, four columns — one per memory. How loud it is, and
what's left of it.
Level
How loud each memory sits in the mix, independent of Send. Goes to 200%, so a memory can be pushed as well as pulled back — useful once one has worn down to almost nothing and you want it back. Defaults to 80%. The top of that range is real gain on one quiet memory. On four loud ones at once it mostly drives the output limiter instead, which holds — nothing clips — but stops getting louder.
Tone
A DJ filter, centred. Turn left and it low-passes, sweeping the top away; turn right and it high-passes, sweeping the bottom away. The middle is a true bypass. It's a performance control, not damage: sweeping it changes what you hear without printing anything onto the tape, so you can take the top off and put it back.
Screen — pages 3–6
Loop A, B, C, D
One page per memory, each named for it, all the same layout. This is
where you decide how that memory comes apart, and how much of it
plays. The top row is what the memory is — its clock, its length,
its tuning — and the bottom row is what's happening to it.
Age
How long this memory has left, from now — 3 seconds to 5 minutes. Everything else is a rate of damage; this is the clock they run against.
Turning it up buys the memory more time. Take a loop that has faded to a quarter, turn Age from 24s to 125s, and it now has the whole 125 seconds ahead of it — coming back up in level and shedding the hiss and erosion that age had brought, while still sounding exactly as ruined as it has become. The damage is on the tape; the clock is not. You can keep doing it, and it always wants to die again. Turning Age down is a rate change and nothing else, exactly as it always was.
The lift takes about nine-tenths of a second rather than happening at the detent — memory sets the loop's level, so snapping it would be a click, loudest from the nearly-dead loop you most want back.
Hold or turn it and a card floats over the page with the slope drawn out on a fixed five-minute axis, so 20 seconds and 300 seconds are two different shapes rather than two numbers. The line is straight because the fading is: memory drains at one constant rate the whole way down.
START
Where in the recording the loop begins, from the head at 0% to the tail at 100%. START and END share one picture across both their cells — a < and a >, each where its own knob is — and the loop is whatever lies between them.
END
Where it stops. Together these two are the loop editor: set both and you play any window of the take you like, not just a shorter version of it.
Nothing is erased — move them back and what you cut returns. The part outside the window also stops wearing out, since it isn't passing the head, so bring it back later and it sounds as it did when you cut it.
Pull END past START and that section plays backwards. The window is the distance between the two knobs whichever way round they are; which one is on the left decides the direction of travel. So END's whole travel is useful, not just the half that shortens. The turn is not a jump: the tape slows, stops and runs back over about a third of a second, the way it would if you reversed a real one.
FREQ
Fine tuning for this memory, a full octave either way in semitones. Its own control, separate from Main's Speed — Speed picks the octave, FREQ trims it. Use it to tune one memory against another by ear while they both play: it lands where you put it in about a twentieth of a second, so you can hear the beating disappear as you turn. It's a tape speed, not a pitch shifter. Tune a memory down and it also runs longer, so two loops coming into tune will drift apart in time. That's the trade for it sounding like tape rather than smeared.
Turning it raises a card showing where you are against the centre detent, marked off in semitones — the reading you actually want while you are hunting for the beating to stop.
ECHO
This memory's own state as a single character — the same codes as Main's ECHO, for this one alone.
Warp
A transport that can't hold its speed: a slow sag, a faster flutter, and a drift that wanders at random so it never settles into a pattern. Gentle settings sag; the top of the travel is a machine coming apart.
Space
How much of this memory goes into the shared reverb at the end of the chain — a long, dense tail of about six and a half seconds. Post-fader, so turning the memory down turns its send down too. The reverb keeps ringing after you pull the send back.
DUST
Both of the medium's surface noises on one knob, because they are the same failure of the same tape and you almost always want them together.
Turn left for VINYL — the medium losing material. A gate that takes the quiet parts first, so what survives is peaks surfacing out of silence rather than holes punched at random. It bites harder the older the take gets.
Turn right for Hiss — noise printed onto the tape on every pass, so it accumulates. Present from the moment you turn it and louder as the take dies: the music disappears and the noise floor doesn't.
Past halfway each end brings the other in behind it, so a full turn either way is all of one and half of the other — never one alone. Both are written back onto the tape, so what they do is permanent. Freeze stops both.
Turning left keeps going. The crackle rises across the whole travel, and three more surfaces arrive behind it, each fading in over its own stretch of the knob:
past 20% — every click gains a soft breath of noise behind it, the stylus in the groove that made the tick. The breath lengthens as you keep turning, from a tick with a little air to a soft shhk.
past 40% — the playback starts to distort the way a worn side does: the peaks fold in, with a little second harmonic so it thickens rather than simply squaring off.
past 60% — grains of the take itself are thrown back over it. Short pieces, at octaves so they stay in tune, landing on simple fractions of the loop so they line up with whatever is already playing rather than scattering at random. They get longer as you turn.
These three are the surface of this playback, not damage to the tape: unlike VINYL and Hiss they are not written back, so turning DUST down takes them away again. That is deliberate — a distortion inside the write-back would square itself on every pass.
Screen — page 7 of 7
Glitch
The end of the chain. Everything above — all four memories and the
reverb they feed — arrives here as one signal, and this page decides
whether it stutters. It works on a grid: every step it rolls a die, and
either passes the audio through or hands it to one of five effects.
Two knobs have to be up before anything happens.
Mix is a blend, Odds is a probability, and either one at zero means the
page is doing nothing at all. That's deliberate — it's safe to leave
loaded and reach for mid-take.
Mix
Dry on the left, fully glitched on the right. At zero the page is bypassed exactly — not nearly.
Step
The grid, from 20 ms to a full second. This is how often the die is rolled, so short steps buzz and long steps land like edits.
Odds
How likely each step is to be taken over. Low settings interrupt occasionally; at the top every single step is glitched.
Size
How much of the step the captured slice covers, which decides how choppy it is — and for Crush, how coarse. Small is frantic, large is chunky.
Kind
Tumble re-rolls which effect on every step. The five it picks from: Stutter loops a slice in place, Rewind plays it backwards, Tape glides to a stop and fades as it slows, Gate chops, and Crush drops the sample rate and the bit depth.
Reach
Where the slice comes from. At zero it's the audio that just went past — the classic stutter. Turned up, it's grabbed from anywhere in the last two seconds, so the page starts quoting the memory rather than repeating it. This is the one to reach for first.
Pitch
How fast the slice plays back, an octave either way. Octave jumps on a stutter are most of the fun.
Width
Scatters each slice across the stereo field, a new position every step.
How it wears out
The knobs set a rate, not a sound
Warp and DUST aren't effects laid over the top.
Each pass, what comes off the tape is written back onto it, so the
next pass reads the damaged version — the same gentle filter applied
three hundred times, the same faint noise printed three hundred
times.
So a knob sets how fast this falls apart. Turn one a little
and nothing dramatic happens immediately; leave it and the loop keeps
going further on its own. Turn one a lot and it's gone in under a
minute.
The knobs themselves move like knobs — turn one and it slews
smoothly to where you put it, no jump, no long glide. Nothing waits
for a take to end.
Because the tape is really being rewritten, it can't be undone.
Turn DUST up, hear it, turn it back down — the noise that was
already printed stays printed. The only thing that restores a memory
is recording a new one, and when a memory finally goes silent every
knob on it returns to its default so the next take starts clean.
Freeze stops all of it. Nothing is written back while a
memory is frozen: it holds exactly as ruined as it was.
Only two of the eight are damage. Warp and DUST
are written back onto the tape. Age is the clock they run against; START
and END choose which part plays; FREQ tunes it; Space is a send; ECHO
just reports. Those, and Tone on the Sound page, are all reversible —
turn them back and what they hid comes back.
Ways to use it
What to actually do with it
A few starting points — all of them just combinations of the controls
above.
Build and let go
Catch a phrase into A, then send to B and keep playing while A fades quietly underneath. By the time you're done with B, A is barely a memory of itself, sitting low in the mix.
Mismatched clocks
Set each memory's Age wildly differently — one at 10 seconds, one at the full 300 — so the mix is always somewhere between freshly caught and almost gone, and it never settles into a repeating cycle.
Catch and hold
Record a chord or a held note, let DUST and Warp work into it for a while, then Freeze right where it sounds best. A strange, stable pad you can play over for as long as you like.
One clean, one crumbling
Push DUST hard on one memory as a textured bed, and leave another completely untouched. The mix always has one steady voice sitting next to one that's coming apart.
Build it in layers
Record a beat, let it loop a few times, then overdub a second pass on top instead of starting over. Keep adding without ever losing what was already there.
Tune them to each other
Record the same note into A and B, then nudge B's FREQ until the beating between them slows and stops. Leave it a few cents out instead and you get a slow chorus that drifts for as long as both survive. Because FREQ is a tape speed, B also runs slightly longer than A, so the two phase apart in time as well as sitting in tune.
Interrupt the whole thing
Leave Glitch loaded with Mix up and Odds low, so it only interrupts occasionally. Push Reach up and it stops repeating what just played and starts pulling fragments out of the last two seconds — the mix stuttering on things you already heard go past.
A drift that never repeats
Nudge Warp up a little at a time over a long Age setting. The pitch wanders further with every turn, and by the time the memory is gone it barely resembles where it started.