Nothing to win

After making Before the name, I kept returning to the sand-building scene in Bee-Bop and Zee. The waves can undo the construction. The afternoon is still worth having.

I wanted to make something you could keep changing without completing it. One pattern brings three notes, the other four. Each keeps the gaps between its own notes. Moving either changes how they meet.

I wrote one extra rule: when both sound at once, a third tone joins them. It belongs to the encounter. Move on, and it may disappear. There is no preferred arrangement, no best score and no prize for making every beat meet.

The poem lets the patterns tell a small joke. Its speakers are invented. The game itself asks only for a move, a listen and perhaps another move.

Both patterns share twelve positions, read clockwise from the top. Amber has triangles on the outer ring; blue has circles on the inner ring. A move rotates one complete pattern by a single position. Its pitches and internal spacing stay with it.

A diamond connects events that occupy the same position. Each meeting tone is twice the geometric mean of the two meeting pitches. It is calculated afresh from the pair. The second listening button isolates these tones; when the patterns have no meetings, it plays the same span of silence.

Sound unfolds twice around the circle. The picture shows the whole arrangement at once. The poem supplies imaginary motives. None of these renderings gives you everything the others do.

Complete authored score · JSON ↗

Catalogue and provenance · JSON ↗

Your moves stay in this tab. Undo, reset or leave whenever you like. Nothing about your play is recorded.