I Bought a Crow

March 3, 2025

Frequency Detection #

I’ve thought about grabbing a Crow for ages. I love Norns and I hate sequencers but also increasingly feel like I need one, sometimes, maybe, possibly.

Crow has always seemed like it sits right in the little sweet spot for how my brain wants to deail with sequencing, with the added benefit that it’s way less intimidating to script for (to me, anyway) than Norns itself. No screen, for one. No audio buffers either. Baby steps.

Anyway, in a recent scan through the Crow docs trying to talk myself into or out of buying one, I saw Crow’s first input has a frequency detection mode which is intended to detect the frequency of an attached oscillator. This seemed like a great shortcut to something I’ve wanted to try for a long time, so now I’ve got a Crow.

Ultimately, the dream is spin up a sequencer that can use arbitrary audio input to create 2-4 independent pitch sequences derived from the spectral information in the audio input. Crow will give me a nice way to play with that in hardware. Next steps are probably a Supercollider script of some kind.

The idea of abusing/misusing pitch detection algorithms to “find” melodies in room sound, silence, or even mangled and filtered steady tones has always been appealing, and I swear Crow’s gonna help me get there. We’ll see.