Gather a flock of birds to take a bird’s-eye view 鳥瞰図 of norns control and taper params and smoothly shift your flight pattern from one to the next. Inspired by Cold Mac’s Survey knob and Mutable Instruments’ Frames module.
Requirements
norns
Documentation
Choukanzu adds several params to the bottom of the params list. fly is The Big Knob; turn it to morph between flight formations. does nothing at first. flock summons birds to watch the flight pattern of params.
Each bird lets you choose a control or taper param to watch;
be warned, changing the selection of a bird’s param will clear the whole flock’s memory of flight formations.
trigger watch to store the state of the watched params as the latest flight formation.
wanted to give this a try but after installation I cannot find the script on the norns library. Even when trying to play it through maiden. Help gratelly appreciated
hi @fellowfinch! This is a mod and not a script—you can find it under SYSTEM > MODS; note that loading a mod requires a restart of Norns. Take a look at this page of the docs under “enabling / disabling a mod” for more details
What a lovely mod, I love being able to build out complex sound morphs with several parameters. I was using it with graintopia to create slow transitions across all three grain spaces simultaniously that I could navigate with one slider. Lots of fun.
One thing I noticed was that with 2 or 3 flight formations set I was getting no movement over most of the range of “fly” and then a quick transition somewhere between each formation. Looking over the code at this section where the formations are added:
for i = 1,watched do
local id = param_options[params:get("choukanzu_bird_" .. i)]
if id ~= "none" then
new_formation[id] = params:get(id)
end
table.insert(formation, new_formation)
params:set("choukanzu_fly", 1)
end
The table.insert command is inside the loop over watched parameters, so the formation list gets several copies of the new_formation table as it gets built. Moving “table.insert” and “params:set” to outside that loop adds only one copy of the new formation and then produces smooth continuous transitions like I expected it to!
thanks for this useful fix! if you feel up to it, I’d love to merge a pull request with this change! if not, let me know and I’ll work on that on my end.
I can’t seem to get this to work - it’s installed fine and appears in the menu, but can’t get it to affect parameters. ‘flock’ causes a bird to appear only at the very bottom of the menu, under ‘nbout’, but assigning it a parameter and then turning the ‘fly’ knob does nothing. Also tried pressing ‘watch’ and tweaking the assigned parameter but the ‘fly’ knob still does nothing. I wonder if the presence of nb is somehow breaking it? Or maybe I misunderstood the instructions!
I haven’t been around in the community for a long time now, but am recently coming back. Thanks for making this incredible mod- last time I played with my norns mods weren’t even a thing yet! Absolutely love how powerful this is- much appreciated for creating it
