Philodendron emerges from fiddling with ringbuffers while working on the internals of Hellebore. Everything inside this reverb-y thing was based on those buffers that keep on eating themselves. It is a quite delicate piece of code to get to work properly (even more so musically). Thus, most of my time working on Hellebore has been dedicated to fixing stuff in this lower level sample-throwing-and-catching loops. And I heard some funny stuff while doing so !
Working toward a circuit bending feeling, I decided to let it pretty raw, I like the simplicity yet versality of the concept and abandoned some more complex ambitions of modulation and rythmic head cues (maybe later in an xtended version).
I wanted the interface to reflect the handles on the DSP I give to the user. I tried to make a concentric UI with layers of circular sliders to be able to represent the actual buffer state and the position of its reading and writing heads, the goal being to really empathize the circular / over&over / Ouroboros feeling of the device.
I overrided the HitTest() of the components to get circular interface elements.
Technically, it was surprisingly easy to make this UI, the whole concept being easily represented by a for loop nesting circle in one another.
Here is an intermediate UI, you can see that without a kind of reference, it's hard to see where you can interact, most widget keep moving and you end up chasing arrows to drag them (an interestingly unpleasant UX). So I added thin circles to make more obvious the placements of sliders and enhance their "reachability". To distinguish parameters more easily, I introduced variety by toying with various strokes and dashes patterns.
You can also notice the attempt of a new N0! lettering, with Times New Roman letters merged in a monogram. I like this idea of a morphing logo from one project to another, after all N0! is not really supposed to be a "brand", and I'm myself not really fixed about noi / Noi / N0! and other variations. In the final version, I kept the original NOI logo that added a nice balance to the seriph crown name and overall design.
Here are some notebook research pages on the UI
