14240 · concatenative graphic score
Ink Score — compose from your whole catalog
Play the computer keyboard like a composer. Number keys pick a recording; SPACE weaves its next in-key phrase — a real slice of Karel's take — onto a left-to-right ink score. A harmony engine keeps the woven result in key, so it reads as music, not collage. In the lineage of Cardew's Treatise and Xenakis's UPIC.
Press Play to wake the audio engine and load the phrase corpus from Karel's catalog, then compose with the keyboard.
How it works
Every one of Karel's recordings is split into phrases at its silences — contiguous note-runs, each carrying its own chroma, register, energy and melodic contour. That is the sound bank: nothing is synthesised. When you weave a phrase, the harmony engine correlates each candidate's chroma against a Krumhansl key profile for the running key and picks the best fit, then applies a small playback-rate detune (≤ ±4 semitones) that snaps its mean pitch onto the nearest diatonic degree. The consonance slider crossfades between raw collage and a fully in-key weave — and because the detune is applied live at each loop pass, re-keying the piece reshapes every mark you already placed. The tradeoff: playback-rate detune also shifts a phrase's tempo and timbre, so the snaps are kept small on purpose.
Refs: Cornelius Cardew, Treatise (1967); Iannis Xenakis, UPIC (1977); “The Concatenator: A Bayesian Approach to Real-Time Concatenative Musaicing” (arXiv:2411.04366).