Brain Custard was inspired by concepts discussed in a 1990 IEEE Conference Paper titled ‘Neural network with interacting oscillators to generate low frequency rhythm’ written by S. Endo & Y. Kinouchi. Particularly this gave impetus to the development of a module using multiple interacting chaotic audio rate signals with the view of finding unexpected patterns, beat frequencies and rhythms in the output signals.

In practise, it is mostly noise and lots of it. The noise can be modulated via the inputs and a great variety of tones can be had tweaking the pots as well. I have the best results feeding the outputs to VCFs and phasers, which work nicely to clean up the sounds and allow all sorts of harmonically rich waveforms to be heard. The chaotic oscillators are similar to those in the Jerkoff chaos module but modified to run at audio rates. This, of course, means the module can be built as a kind of Jerkoff on steroids and be used as a source of ridiculously complex CVs. The PCB is labelled for the audio rate version, details for building the module as a CV generator will be given in the instructions.

Using the module: Inputs can be anything; audio, gates, triggers or CV. Depending upon the pot settings, the input signals may do a lot or do little. The X, Y & Z outputs are mixes from the same stages of different oscillators, consider them minor Σ (sum) neurons. Custard is just everything jammed in together, so the main output neuron. Blend is the X, Y & Z outputs mixed together via the Blend pots, these pots have +/-1 gain, meaning when the pot is at 0 the signal is inverted and if the pot is at its mid-point the signal is off.