The Pad
Arrows · up and down step the degree, left and right shift the octave
1
The one FellowSoft screen you can carry out of the house. A leaf chooses one setting for the musical study already in this page; external tool fitting is not yet proved, and no radio is fitted.
This is the Stubbook running one instrument. Eight stops latch under your fingers, the Bellows gives the choir its breath, and the Pad gives it notes. Everything you hear is made from oscillators and filters inside this page. Nothing is fetched, nothing is recorded, and nothing leaves.
Throw WAKE and the Stubbook makes its first sound. Nothing sounds before you do.
This browser gives no WebGL, so the Stubbook is drawn flat instead of turned. Everything it does still works.
Drag a card up onto the Stubbook and let go over its crown . or click one . or tab to it and press Enter
Nothing is fitted
The crown is empty. Drag a card up onto the Stubbook, or press Enter on one.
Nothing is fitted
Pressing the cards.
Ten stiff printed cards, and they are loose. The slot is on the object itself: one card goes into its top edge at a time and stands proud of the crown, so you can read across a room what the thing is doing. The card standing out of the top is always the card that is sounding, and that correspondence is the whole point of the slot.
Seven of them are leaves, which are one setting each, and three are themes, which are whole pieces. Both press onto the same face under the same kind byte, because the card is one format and a second one would be a second thing to keep true. Fitting a card reads the marks off it, mends whatever the parity has to mend, and hands the instrument what came back from the paper. Nothing here hands back the thing it started from.
A leaf gives the bench a setting and the bench plays it, so the stops, the Pad and the Bellows are all still in the path. A theme is a written piece and it drives the instrument itself, so while one is fitted the stops are standing state and not a signal path: they say what they say and the piece does not go through them. Pull the card out and the bench has the instrument back.
The card format is a candidate and has not passed its gate. It has an open encoder, a decoder and error correction, all three of them in this page. It does not have print tolerance, scan tolerance, or an ordinary printer proof. Said plainly here because it is shown here.
Every one of these is on the object, and every one does what its name says. The keyboard is the whole instrument.
Keys 1 to 8 · they latch
Arrows · up and down step the degree, left and right shift the octave
H latches the drone · V cycles the register
Choir
Q opens · A closes · it holds where you leave it
Opens the filter and walks the vowel from oo to ah.
Comma and full stop turn it through the collection · Enter fits what it is standing on
Left and right bracket · slow on purpose
Lamplight
W · L · K
Keep shutters the slot and pins Wake down. Nothing turns on or falls out.
The leaf sets it. The Pad cannot reach a wrong note.
Dorian
Minor with a bright sixth. The house mode once the kick is in.
P · the card is drawn in this page
It carries the stops you drew, the mode, the tempo, and the run number.
Drawn on a canvas here in the page. Save it with your own browser if you want it; nothing is pushed at you.
Press P or the button above and the card is redrawn from whatever the Stubbook is doing at that moment. It is a picture in this tab. It is not uploaded, not stored, and it is gone when you close the frame.
Why this object is a Stubbook, and could not honestly be called anything else.
The charter puts him on the windowsill in one line. "On the sill sits Stub, a small printed ticket that is also FellowSoft's making language."
Now look at what goes into the top edge of this object. A leaf is a stiff printed card carrying one complete setting for the musical study already inside this page, small enough to push into a slot with a thumb. It has the charter ticket's shape, but it is the carrier, not a stub definition. Seven of them ride in the rack on this page, and every one is a small printed ticket.
A stub book is the plain trade name for the counterfoil book a ticket is torn from: many counterfoils bound at one edge, opened to one at a time. The inherited name describes this object's book-of-tickets gesture. This working proof carries a rack of settings and stands one leaf proud of the top edge so anyone across the room can read which one is in. The intended successor would instead fit one schema-valid external stub from the carrier it is handed. Holding many and showing one is what a book does, and there is no other word in the language that does it.
The rest of the name is material kinship. Stub is folded paper. He unfolds to travel and refolds to settle, and that is not a figure of speech in this house; it is the sequence he actually runs. This slate carries the same compact paper gesture in pressed board and cream bakelite. The brass plate on the back names that kinship; it does not make the device Stub or make the carrier the tool definition.
Where this object is going, set down while it is still only a plan.
Every tool needs a stub. A stub is the definition. The card is the carrier you own.
The seven leaves in the rack above already act as carriers, and they are already the right shape: one stiff drawn card, one complete setting for the musical study embedded in this page, pushed into the top edge with a thumb. What they are not yet is paper, and what they do not yet carry is an external stub definition. The direction is that they stop being drawn and start carrying one schema-valid tool each. When that larger system is proved, every tool the household makes gets a real printed carrier, and the Stubbook runs no tool it has not been handed one for. That is software as an object: a thing you own, shelve, lend and hold. It is the promise the late nineteen nineties made about what sat on a desk and never kept, and the late nineteen nineties is the shelf this whole object was built for.
A wish becomes canon when somebody measures it, so it was measured against the real thing a card would have to carry. The largest plate in the Stub Specimen Book is five thousand seven hundred and forty nine bytes of executed compiler output, and one thousand four hundred and eighty two bytes gzipped. A QR code at version forty, binary, error correction level L, holds two thousand nine hundred and fifty three bytes. So the largest tool this house has actually compiled goes onto one printed card and leaves about as much room again unused, and the smaller plates fit several times over. Nothing proprietary is needed for any of it and no special media: a code printed on card, and a lens to read it. Both are commodity, and both are older than the object that would use them.
What makes that right rather than merely clever is the line this device already prints on its own screen. NOT FITTED against Network is a design statement and not a fault report, and a lens reading a card somebody physically put in front of it is not a radio. The object would take in exactly what it was handed and stay incapable of reaching anything it was not. That is the ownership argument made in hardware instead of in copy. A card cannot be revoked, cannot report back, and cannot be changed under you while you sleep.
And the same lens would serve twice. Point it at a card and a tool loads. Point it at the room and it takes a picture, rendered down to this device's own reflective monochrome screen. One sensor, two uses, and no feature creep in between. The precedent is nineteen ninety eight, when a camera that plugged into the top of a handheld shot small greyscale, dithered everything it saw, and made objects people have kept for a quarter of a century.
Now the honest half, because canon that oversells itself is worth nothing. True today: the leaves are already drawn cards, seven of them, each one a whole setting rather than a preset; this object already prints a leaf carrying its own settings when P is pressed; and the proposed encoding has been measured against real compiled output. Not true today: there is no camera on this object, no printed card is read by anything here, and this page does not validate or fit an external stub definition. The Camera line in the ledger below says Not fitted because it is not fitted. This is written down so the thread cannot be lost, not because it shipped.
What the thing in your hands actually is, which is not the instrument you have been playing.
The Stubbook is not an instrument. It is the intended handheld runtime. In this working proof, the instrument is the musical study embedded in the page, and each leaf carries one of its settings.
Read the object the other way round from the way this page has been reading it. Everything above is what one embedded musical study does. The board under it enacts the portable half of the household's intended system: the house is where the work is done, and this is the half that leaves. It runs alone, with no radio and nothing to reach. Fit a different setting carrier and the same study changes its setting; this proof does not yet fit a different tool. The instrument is the embedded study, not the leaf and not the object.
A future leaf is intended to carry the whole tool definition rather than a key to one kept somewhere else, and that is the difference the slot is meant to prove. The card is stiff, printed, small enough to push into the top edge with a thumb, and it stands proud there so anyone across the room can read which one is in. You own it, you shelve it, you lend it, and you can see what you own by looking at the shelf. How such a card could be read is measured in the section above: a printed code and a lens, both commodity, both older than the object, and neither of them a format anybody could lock you out of. That fit remains a proposal until a real external definition passes through it.
So the first modular law is already clear even though the general runtime is not yet proved. A leaf is a carrier module. In this page it chooses one setting inside the study already standing there. The next proof is a schema-valid external stub arriving through the same slot on the same kind of card. There is no second way in. No account, no store, and no channel by which a tool could reach the intended object that a hand did not carry to it. That is a smaller machine than the one you are used to, and a larger one to own.
The second kind of modular is drawn on the object rather than argued for. The case is bound by a brass band, brushed lengthwise, with the lacquer worn off it at the thumbs and along the foot where a hand actually sits. Six brass slot screws stand openly on the back; nothing back there is hidden and nothing is glued. The battery door has a leaf spring catch, three alkaline cells behind it, and a line letterpressed inside where only an owner would ever read it: if this opens and the parts are inside, it is still yours. A thing you can open is a thing you can keep, and that is the entire argument for putting the screws where they show.
The pane over the page is horn, one and a half millimetres of it, and horn scratches. Two scratches are drawn into this one already, because an object carried this long would have them. Something honest about its own wear ought to let you fit a fresh pane, and the well is drawn with a raised bezel standing around it. Whether that bezel lifts, and on what fastenings, is not drawn and is not decided; a fastener nobody has designed does not get invented in a field note.
Now the honest half, in the same discipline the sections above keep. True today: the leaves are drawn here rather than printed, seven of them in the rack, each a whole setting rather than a preset; this object prints a leaf carrying its own settings when P is pressed; and the sound is genuinely made in this page, oscillator by oscillator, with nothing fetched. Not true today: no camera is fitted, no printed card is read by anything here, and no leaf exists that fits a tool other than this one, so nothing yet proves in the hand what this section argues on the page. The physical modularity past the band, the screws and the door is a hope and not a plan. And the eight stops are letterpressed on the board with the names the instrument gives them, which is the last place the object is still married to the leaf that is in it.
None of that is a feature. It is a description, set down now so that the next leaf arrives to an argument already made rather than to an instrument with an unusual name.
That last run of lines is not an apology. It is the design. The Stubbook is the one screen in this house you can carry out of it, and the reason your data stays yours is that nothing here can carry it away.
| Key | Control |
|---|---|
| W | Wake. Power, and the gesture that lets sound begin. |
| ↑ ↓ | The Pad. Step the scale degree. |
| ← → | The Pad. Shift the octave. |
| H | Hold. Latch the sounding note as a drone. |
| V | Voice. Breath, Choir, Distant, Glass, Forest. |
| 1 to 8 | The Eight Stops. They latch, like organ stops. |
| Q A | The Bellows. Open toward ah, close toward oo. |
| , . Enter | The Selector. Turn through the collection, press to fit. |
| T | Turn the fitted card over to its pressed back. |
| Backspace | Pull the fitted card out of the slot. |
| [ ] | The Tempo screw. Forty to one hundred and thirty two. |
| L | Sidelight. One amber lamp behind the horn pane. |
| K | Keep. Shutters the slot, pins Wake down, all stops silent. |
| P | Print a leaf onto the card below. |
The slate you are turning is a real sculpt carried in as numbers: four thousand and ninety two points and just under eight thousand faces, quantised to sixteen bits and unpacked at boot. No model file is fetched, because none exists to fetch.
Two things about it are not the drawing. The sculpt never grew the handle the design asks for, so the Stubbook here is a plain slate with a rounded foot. And the sculpt carries five raised keys where the design draws eight, so the paint gives you eight and the relief under it gives you five. Eight drawn stops is the thing you sketch from memory, so the paint wins and the record says so.
The pane in the sculpt is taller than the panel the design names, so the page is drawn two hundred and forty by three hundred rather than two hundred and forty by two hundred. The three bands are in the order the design sets them: the stop ledger, the roll, and the four status lines.
Its faces are drawn from both sides on purpose. The carve left five hundred and fifty five open edges along the card and the screen well, and a single sided pass would show straight through them.
The choir is source and filter, not a sample. A glottal wave falling at about twelve decibels an octave feeds five parallel bandpass formants with the second and fourth turned upside down so the gaps between them fill in rather than notch out, plus a fixed peak at two thousand nine hundred hertz, which is the cluster that lets a singer carry over a band. Breath runs through the same formants at a whisper, which is what makes it read as a throat instead of an organ pipe.
The beat is scheduled on the audio clock with a hundred and twenty milliseconds of lookahead, never on the animation frame, so it does not wander. Swing lands on the hats and the second pulse only, never on the kick, because swinging everything gives you a stiff shuffle and swinging only the top gives you a groove.
The chip layer is held to four channels on purpose: two pulse, one wave, one noise. The limit is the aesthetic. Arpeggios exist because chords do not fit.