Capicola

At its core, Capicola is the hardware implementation of “Extrema Sampling,” a novel data compression algorithm that reduces uniformly sampled 48kHz audio into non-uniform “Keyframes” of local extrema (peaks and valleys of the signal). The “Quality” knob determines the level of data compression applied in a continuous, modulatable fashion. It’s not bitcrush, it’s not downsampling. It’s a tape-like degradation the likes of which exist literally nowhere else.

This non-uniform sampling scheme, not dissimilar from Keyframe Animation in Blender 3D, is the basis for Capicola’s novel approach to “Overlap Add” time stretching in which the spacing between keyframes informs the granular crossfade duration. This inherently preserves the beats and tones, leaving the user with a “Grain Size” macro control.

Capicola also offers a novel approach to nonlinear distortion, again enabled by the keyframe representation. The distortion is applied to the keyframes in the “sparse domain” before the final interpolation, resulting in a naturally alias-free distortion that requires no oversampling and can facilitate many wild nonlinearities with ease.

Each of Capicola’s main controls is fully modulatable from the internal envelope followers and external CV, with dedicated attenuverters for the internal modulation. The envelope follower is an excellent source of “self” modulation, and easily leads to evolving, dynamic patches with a mind of their own.

The “Threshold” control allows the user to easily create “glitch fills” by temporarily disabling the beat snapping. The settings of stretch, pitch, and grain size lead to anything from ethereal washes of time-stretched sound to beat-synced looping segments.

The visual feedback engine of Alchemy Lab makes multiple pages of controls a pleasure to use rather than an exercise in memory. Capicola utilizes four color-coded pages to offer settings that are wide enough in scope to offer supreme flexibility but only when the user needs it. The main controls are knob-per-function on the main panel, and everything else acts in service of them.

Heavylight Industries started with a frustrated sampler user figuring out how to time stretch on a device that offered no such feature. The end result was the idea of non-uniform sampling: a novel, fast, keyframe-sampling compression and stretch algorithm.

Capicola is the first embodiment of this algorithm, but the "Keyframe" idea can power so much more: an endless CV recorder, a sampler, or maybe even an entirely new time-frequency representation for signals that will drive another dimension of audio possibilities. Only time will tell.

Matthew (Heavylight) and Luke (Hermetic), both residents of Cascadia, met by chance online. Hours after reaching out, the pair from the Pacific Northwest were hacking on the hardware prototype that was to become Capicola.