how to play
Press space or the plate to start. There is no keyboard to play: the box plays itself, and you shape the odds. A master clock feeds three generators, each running at its own multiple of it. Every tick of a generator is a coin flip, and an agent listens to one generator and flips a second coin of its own before it plays. chance is that second coin. accent sets how much the height of each note can fall below full. bias doesn't change how often an agent plays but which pitches it picks, pushing the dice towards the top or the bottom of the range.
Each agent is a complex oscillator (ratio and FM) folded by a wavefolder (fold, sym) and then struck through a low-pass gate that behaves like a vactrol: it opens in a couple of milliseconds and closes slowly, the slower the darker it gets (vactrol). Pitch is snapped to a scale, and the root follows a MIDI keyboard if you have one (press midi → root). The lamp beside each agent's name is its gate.
The strip of 48 cells is the state of the dice, and it is the only source of chance in the instrument. Type the same seed and press restart and the same piece plays again, note for note. That is why the stamp saysP: the post argues it from the generator up. record keeps what comes out, sample for sample, as a take you can play back or download as a WAV file.
After Giorgio Sancristoforo's Ongaku, a west-coast synthesizer whose voices are called agents and whose controls are probabilities, and after the Buchla 266 Source of Uncertainty. This is the same instrument as the GUZEN plugin, rewritten to run in the page. Nothing here is affiliated with either.