Loops
A handful of voices, one note each, loop lengths that never divide evenly. The table below is the entire score, after Brian Eno’s 2/1, in the lineage of SSEYO’s Koan. The composer writes the system; the system plays the piece.
This table lines up again once every ≈1,128 years.
The score
What a voice may sing
Change the scale and every voice snaps to the nearest note it is still allowed. The grid underneath (twelve equal steps, A at 440) was decided long before this page.
Whether it evolves
Drift lets a voice step to a neighbouring scale tone when it fires. Even “rarely” destroys the repeat time above: a system that re-decides anything never returns to its starting state.
What a note even is
A note here is an onset with an envelope and a fixed room around it: the delay, its feedback, its filter are not controls. Somebody decided you would not need them.
The composer ships the system
In 1978 Eno made 2/1 from tape loops of single sung notes, each loop a different length, left to run: because the lengths share no convenient divisor, the combination drifts out of and back into alignment on a cycle longer than anyone will listen. In 1996 he released Generative Music 1 on floppy disk: software, not audio, running on SSEYO’s Koan engine, which survives today as Wotja. The piece was a set of constraints; every playback an original.
The table above is the same object. Its output is endless, but everything about it was decided in advance: which twelve pitches exist, which of them are permitted, how a note swells and dies, how the room echoes. When the repeat time reads in centuries, that is not the system being creative. It is arithmetic on the loop lengths, which you set.