Antimatch

A spectral lookup effect that rebuilds your sound from slices of itself — but lets you choose the slice that fits worst. Pushed one way it echoes; pushed the other it spits out a counter-rhythm that fights the source, then hollows it into a ghostly spectral negative.

How it works

Antimatch keeps a rolling library of the last sixteen chunks of audio it heard, each tagged with a fingerprint of its spectrum. Every hop it fingerprints the incoming sound and searches that library: at one extreme it pastes back the chunk most like the input (an echo of what you just played), at the other it pastes the chunk least like it — a contrary slice that pulls against the source. Past that point it keeps the worst match but progressively subtracts the live input's spectrum out of it, cancelling away whatever the two share and leaving only the difference.

Controls

  • Slice — the size of the chunks it works on, 32 steps from 64 to 4096 samples. Small slices react fast and stay percussive and grainy; large slices smear into slow, evolving texture.
  • Invert — the heart of the module. Fully down pastes the closest match, an echo of the input. At centre it pastes the worst match — the library slice least like what you're playing, a built-in counter-rhythm. Above centre it keeps that worst match and ramps in spectral subtraction, hollowing the output into a spectral negative of the source.
  • Depth — how many of the sixteen most-recent slices are allowed to compete for the match, 2 to 16. Wide open, the whole library is in play for the longest memory and the widest pick of counter-slices; turn it down and the pool tightens toward only the freshest slices, giving shorter memory and tighter, more repetitive counter-rhythms.
  • Mix — dry/wet blend; fully up is 100% wet, so the effect stands in for the source.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — the stereo audio to process; the source Antimatch fingerprints and rebuilds from.
  • Slice / Invert / Depth / Mix CV — voltage control over each knob, summed with its setting; patch an LFO or envelope to any of them to perform the slice size, match rank, memory depth, or dry/wet over time.
  • Out L / Out R — the reconstructed stereo result.

Tips

  • It needs to hear about sixteen slices before its library fills, so expect a brief silence when you first patch it in or change Slice.
  • Modulate Invert with a slow LFO to drift between echo and counter-rhythm on the fly.
  • Small Slice with high Invert gives glitchy, percussive counterpoint; large Slice drifts into ghostly spectral pads.