Voices

Where Loops plays fixed notes on fixed periods, a voice here chooses every note as it goes, by rolling dice you have loaded. This is the move SSEYO’s Koan made in 1994, and the engine line that became Wotja. The panel below shows each roll.

Volume chord: I 0 notes chosen

The dice

Press run. Every note will show its odds.

The voices

Low 1 Register Movement Note length How often it sings · ~4 a minute

Mid 2 Register Movement Note length How often it sings · ~10 a minute

High 3 Register Movement Note length How often it sings · ~7 a minute

The allowed notes

No voice can sing a note outside this set. The rule is absolute and silent. Nothing in the output announces it.

Harmony

With chords on, a triad drifts every fifteen seconds or so and every voice’s dice lean toward it: three independent voices agreeing without a conductor. Watch the chord numeral by the transport.

Temperature

Cold sharpens the dice toward the single likeliest note; hot flattens them toward the whole scale.

Rules, then dice

Koan’s premise was that a piece of music could be a set of tendencies: a voice knows its register, how far it likes to move, how often it sings, what harmony it leans toward, and everything else is decided at playback, by weighted chance. Eno’s Generative Music 1 shipped on exactly that engine. The composer’s work moved one level up: not choosing the notes, but loading the dice that choose the notes.

The panel above makes the loading visible. Every bar chart is a probability distribution that existed for a moment before a note was drawn from it, authored by four rules you can point at.

Loops is this page with the dice removed; Wotja is this page with thirty years of engine added. Back to Lab 01.