Cage's I Ching Method — 6 flips build a hexagram that determines musical parameters
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PITCH
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OCTAVE
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DURATION
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DYNAMIC
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REST
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ARTICUL.
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John Cage used the I Ching in Music of Changes (1951) to remove compositional intention. 64 hexagrams governed pitch, duration, dynamics, and silence. The result felt more alive than anything composed from personal taste.
Section 03
MARKOV MUSIC MACHINE
Click piano keys to build a seed melody. Watch transition probabilities update live.
Input melody: —
Markov chains model melodies by learning transition probabilities from input music. In 1st-order chains, the next note depends only on the current note. In 2nd-order, it depends on the last two — producing more coherent phrases.
Section 04
L-SYSTEM MELODY GARDEN
Rewriting rules grow both a botanical structure and a musical phrase simultaneously.
PRESETS
String length: 0
L-Systems (Lindenmayer, 1968) use string rewriting to model plant growth. The same recursive expansion that draws branching forms also generates recursive musical patterns — pitch and structure emerge from identical rules.
Section 05
CELLULAR AUTOMATON COMPOSER
Click cells to set state. Live cells trigger pitched events. The grid evolves, the music evolves.
Step: 0 |
Live cells: 0
Simple neighbor-counting rules create complex, non-repeating musical output. You set the seed; the system composes. Each generation remaps the 32-column window to a 16-step sequencer that advances in time.
Section 06
EUCLIDEAN RHYTHM DEEP DIVE
ALGORITHM VISUALIZER
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POLYRHYTHM CANVAS
LCM realignment in: — beats
The Bjorklund algorithm distributes k events as evenly as possible across n steps — the same math that governs neutron timing in particle accelerators. Toussaint (2005) showed these patterns match world percussion: Tresillo (Cuba), Clave (Afro-Cuban), Bembé (West Africa).
Section 07
LIVE CODING STAGE
Ready
Live coding (TOPLAP, 2003) makes code visible to the audience — programming is the performance. TidalCycles, SuperCollider, and Sonic Pi brought this practice into concert halls. The mistake is part of the music.
Section 08
OBLIQUE STRATEGIES ORACLE
Click the card to receive a strategy
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APPLIED STRATEGIES
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Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created the original Oblique Strategies (1975) to break creative deadlock. Each card offered a lateral instruction — a constraint that forced the composer out of habitual thinking.
Section 09
NEURAL MELODY INTERPOLATOR
Click grid cells to toggle notes. Drag the blend slider to morph between Melody A and Melody B.
MELODY A
MELODY B
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INTERPOLATED MELODY
MusicVAE (Magenta, 2018) encodes melodies into a continuous latent space where interpolation sounds musically smooth. This simplified model demonstrates the core concept: weighted blending of pitch and presence across time steps.
Section 10
ALGORITHMIC COMPOSERS
John Cage
Chance operations via I Ching
Music of Changes — 1951
"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it."
Brian Eno
System-based generative music
Discreet Music — 1975
"Music that puts itself together from a set of rules."