A synthesizer that is the whole computer.
It starts from a USB stick straight into the instrument, with no operating system underneath, on PCs from the late 1990s to now.
One of the four splashes it plays as it starts: GENDY, after Xenakis's dynamic stochastic synthesis.
BARE! is the program the PC starts, and nothing else runs: the keys, the screen and the sound chip belong to the instrument.
Any PC since the Pentium Pro, from 32 MB of memory up, BIOS or UEFI. It sizes itself to what it finds.
It runs from memory, so the stick can come out while you play. Projects, songs and your own instruments are saved on it.
An omnichord you play like the real one, a lineage of homages with their histories, and Doom's first level as breakcore. This is the first release, a beta: it works, and it is still being tried on more machines.
F1 PLAY
PLAY is laid out after Suzuki's OM-108 and its owner's manual. The three letter rows are its MAJOR, MINOR and 7th chord buttons, pressed together for maj7, m7, dim, aug, sus4 and add9; the bottom row and the touchpad are its 13-string strumplate.
Ten voices, ten rhythms that change at the next bar, AUTO chords and bass, HOLD, SYNC START, a keyboard mode with drums, and MIDI out on its channels.
Try it: hold 6 and run a finger along the keys from Z to /.
F11 LINEAGE
Instruments after the people who made the music: Iannis Xenakis, with five views of his own; Murzin's ANS synthesizer, with a drone sketch after Coil; Steve Reich's phasing; Wendy Carlos's alpha, beta and gamma scales; Éliane Radigue's slow drones; Merzbow's noise from junk.
Each one plays, and each has a short history beside it: who, how, and what to listen to. TOUCH has one too: Michel Waisvisz and his Crackle Box.
F12 LINEAGE › XENAKIS
In 1954 Iannis Xenakis drew 46 string glissandi as straight lines on graph paper, and together they made curved surfaces — the same surfaces became the Philips Pavilion.
Here you set two guide lines, the strings are strung between them, and the surface turns in 3D while it sounds. Enter writes it onto UPIC's page.
F2 SEQ · Shift+4
The tracker reads Doom's first-level music from the WAD on your stick — yours, or Freedoom's — and lays it out on its grid: guitars and bass under chopped breakbeats at 172 BPM, snare rolls, stutters, a breakdown and a tape stop.
The notes come from your WAD; the arrangement is BARE!'s. The picture is Freedoom's E1M1.
How it got here: CHANGES.md.
A page on each F key, and they all play at once: a song on the tracker, a chord held on PLAY, the tape rolling.
An omnichord after Suzuki's OM-108: the three letter rows are its chord buttons, the bottom row and the touchpad its 13-string strumplate, with a rhythm section whose chords and bass follow you. F1 again goes on to the instruments made from text files.
Cmaj7: C with the 7th button beside it. The strings take the chord.
A tracker: patterns of eight channels, an order list, effect columns, every note on the exact sample.
One of the demo songs, playing.
A Fairlight-style page, green on black: waves drawn with the touchpad, harmonics, a 3D stack of them, and a sampler.
The eight waves, stacked in 3D.
Freezes the phrase you just played and stretches it, up to a thousand times slower, while you play on.
Four-operator FM: eight algorithms, envelopes, an LFO, four patches to play anywhere.
An eight-track tape with reels, wow and hiss: record, overdub, loop, bounce, build whole songs.
Projects on the stick, songs out as WAV, MIDI and Ableton Link, which key opens what, the log, and an installer.
Projects on the stick.
A strip for every source, sends to an echo and a reverb, and a filter, drive and crusher on the master.
A crackle box after Michel Waisvisz's Kraakdoos: the eight bare pads of a small circuit. Fingers close it, pressing harder bends it, and under the board is his story.
Effects to play live over a song: repeat, reverse, tape stop, gate, a dub throw, a reverb freeze.
Homages you can play, each with a short history: who made the music, how, and what to listen to. XENAKIS is the first of them, with five views of its own.
Iannis Xenakis: METASTASEIS, CLOUDS, SIEVES, UPIC and GENDY on a bar of their own. F12 goes straight there.
Inside LINEAGE, on a key of its own: five of Iannis Xenakis's ways of making music, in the order he found them.
String glissandi strung between two guide lines: the ruled surfaces of the Philips Pavilion.
You need a USB stick of 256 MB or more — everything on it is replaced — and a PC that can start from USB.
The same image twice: the .zip for Windows and macOS, the .xz for Linux. There is also an ISO for a CD or a virtual machine and a floppy (neither keeps projects), and SHA256SUMS.
.zip you downloaded (in Raspberry Pi Imager: Choose OS, then Use custom), then the stick, and write..zip you downloaded, Select target and the stick, Flash. (In Raspberry Pi Imager: Choose OS, then Use custom.)One line downloads the image and writes it. First find the stick: lsblk lists the disks, and the one with your stick's size is it, sdb for example.
curl -L https://github.com/willbearfruits/bare/releases/download/v1.0-beta/bare-1.0-beta.img.xz | xz -dc | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progressPut the stick's name where sdX is. Whatever disk you name is overwritten.
Or balenaEtcher with the .zip, as on the other systems.
Why not straight from this page? A web page can't write to a USB stick: browsers keep disks out of its reach, on purpose, and their USB access leaves storage devices out. So it takes one of these tools, once.
Turn Secure Boot off in the firmware settings. Plug the stick in and pick it from the boot menu: usually F12, F9, F8 or Esc at power-on.
When the splash plays, press any key. Hold 6 and run a finger along the keys from Z to /: a C major chord, strummed. The F keys open the pages; Shift+? shows every key.
Already have a BARE! stick? Put BARE.UPD in its root and start from it: it updates itself and keeps your projects.
BARE! fits on one 3.5" 1.44 MB diskette. It starts a PC that has a BIOS and a floppy drive, an internal one or a USB drive the BIOS boots from, and plays like the stick, but can't save.
bare-1.0-beta-floppy.img 1.5 MBsudo dd if=bare-1.0-beta-floppy.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k. A USB floppy drive is a /dev/sdX: lsblk shows which.diskutil list finds it, diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskN, then sudo dd if=bare-1.0-beta-floppy.img of=/dev/rdiskN bs=18k.Booted in emulators so far. GRUB starts it: Limine, the stick's boot loader, can't read floppy drives.
A different splash each time it starts: a short piece, picture and sound.
An instrument is a text file on the stick: what it sounds like, and how it is played — the letter rows, the touchpad as a strip or a grid of pads, an arpeggio, a drone. Five come with it. SHRUTI is a shruti box: its keys open reeds tuned in just intonation, and a finger moving on the touchpad pumps the bellows.
# SHRUTI.TXT, less its comments name: SHRUTI [sound] wave: pulse width: 22 detune: 8 attack: 160 release: 500 [play] keys: chromatic C3 tuning: just hold: toggle bellows: yes
The format: INSTRUMENTS.md.
Type iddqd on any page and it runs Doom, with the WAD on your stick: your own, or Freedoom's. The F keys go back to the synthesizer, and Doom waits. Its music is played by BARE!'s own voices.
38 A4 pages: every page of the instrument with its keys, the instrument files, which machines, and the stick. Made to be printed.