14048 · rhyme loom
Rhyme Loom — play your song by its own echoes
Weave one of Karel's recordings into a self-similarity matrix, then improvise a never-ending path through it by leaping between the moments that rhyme — every leap lands on a bar that harmonically matches, so his fixed take becomes an infinite, playable instrument.
Pick a track and weave the loom to see its recurrence matrix.
Recording
Welcome Home
Snowflake
How it works
The recording is sliced into short fixed segments. Each segment is reduced to a 12-D chroma vector — pitch-class energy measured by a bank of Goertzel filters across several octaves — so bars in the same harmony point the same direction. The cosine similarity of every pair of segments is the woven matrix you see; its bright diagonal stripes are the passages Karel repeats. Playback advances bar by bar with equal-power crossfades, but a leap sends the playhead to one of a bar's precomputed rhymes — a distant bar whose chroma matches — so the path can wander forever and still sound intentional. Click a cell, press J, or turn on auto-wander.
Refs: Jonathan Foote, “Visualizing Music and Audio using Self-Similarity” (ACM Multimedia 1999); Paul Lamere, “The Infinite Jukebox” (2012).