14096 · song wheel
Song Wheel — play your recording's own form
One of Karel's recordings, laid out as a radial clock: its auto-detected sections are the colored arcs on the rim, glowing chords cross the interior to link the bars that rhyme, and a playhead orbits the current moment. Click an arc to loop a section, follow a chord to a distant echo, or let it wander — every leap is snapped to the downbeat, so it always lands in time.
Pick a track and build the wheel to see its form.
Recording
Welcome Home
Snowflake
How it works
The recording is decimated to mono and run through a hand-rolled FFT to measure onset strength (spectral flux). Autocorrelating that curve estimates the tempo; a phase-aligned beat grid — snapped to nearby onsets so it tracks rubato — is grouped into bars, and every fourth (or third) beat is a downbeat. Each bar becomes a 12-D chroma vector, and the cosine similarity of every pair of bars is the self-similarity matrix. Foote's checkerboard-kernel novelty along that matrix's diagonal finds the section boundaries you see as rim arcs; sections are clustered by mean chroma so a returning theme reuses its letter. The strongest cross-bar matches are the glowing chords. Playback advances bar by bar with equal-power crossfades, and every leap — a section click, a chord, a wander, or J — takes effect at the next downbeat and lands on a matched downbeat.
Refs: Jonathan Foote, “Automatic Audio Segmentation Using a Measure of Audio Novelty” (IEEE ICME 2000); Paul Lamere, “The Infinite Jukebox” (2012). Lineage: 14048 Rhyme Loom.