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The Music of Stranger Things and "Universal Event Generators" [1]
['Ethan Persoff']
Date: 2022-08-04
These are complicated times.
If this is The Upside Down theme, it would sound erratic. The note lengths are all over the place . The first note looks like it lasts twenty seconds! with a bunch of very fast notes and then a very slow final eighth note that's close to a full droning minute. Maybe if this was a European film that would work, but this is Spielberg-ian stuff. I'm going to guess the TIME dials were not used in The Upside Down sequence and used an external GATE clock. (More on that in a minute.) However, they could also easily switch back and forth to this TIME setting by disabling the GATE input, which would allow The Upside Down theme to drift slowly around, kind of in a dreamy way. Add some reverb and each note would pop irregularly in the air. Say, Eleven had too many Eggo-blended Shirley Temples and faded away to nosebleed-ville while she dismantles a Shark in her head. If activated, this would retain the notes but play them in wildly distended time.
Oh, one cool thing – Do you see the small row of numbers above the dials, numbered 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and 8 ? It's clearer in the large image above of the panel. Those are LED lights. They not only illuminate when a note is active (and for how long) but they also change intensity for how much level they are sending out, from bright to a high note and low to a low note. It's a small feature but allows complete visual understanding of where the sequencer is – which is useful because this is a bit of a random generator that can easily confuse you.
So, returning to those wacky time settings. They probably used an external clock. You'd input that into GATE:
The four jacks: GATE (input) TCV (input) OUT (output) TRIG (output)
The TCV setting is for users familiar with the module, but boy is it cool. You can feed fluxuating voltage into that input and it will unpredictably lengthen each stage by up to 8 seconds, or less, then more, etc. It doesn't need to be in sync, either, so it can affect different note lengths every time as the sequence runs. Let's ignore that, but wow!
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