PILOT
KALPAPLAYER
a SparrowLegs piece
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The player only loads when you press play.
Kalpaplayer is a piece of experimental electronic music that never stops.
Every midnight, a random number generator chooses three to four synthesizer sounds, their settings, as well as picking a tempo, a key, and a scale. The music plays with that “palette” for 24 hours. At midnight the “palette” dies, the next one is born, and the music carries on in a new form.
Every day stays in the archive, regardless of whether it turned out to be a complete mess or whether it sounded beautiful.
How a day is made
- SEED
- The date, written as a number (3 October 2026 is 20261003). It starts the random number generator, so every day is unique and can be rebuilt.
- SOUNDS
- A bass, a harmony sound and a lead, plus a wildcard on some days, chosen from about 3,050 presets for the open-source Surge XT synthesizer.
- SCALE
- A family of scales (Western, Chinese, Japanese, Javanese or Ethiopian), then a scale within it, in any key.
- MUTATION
- How far each sound's filter, envelope and LFO settings are pushed from the preset.
- DAY
- The count since Kalpaplayer began. It never resets.
Lineage
A kalpa is an aeon in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. In Hindu tradition one kalpa lasts 4.32 billion years.
Kalpaplayer is a digital, experimental cousin of Longplayer, Jem Finer's thousand-year composition, and takes its cue from John Cage's Organ²/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible), which an organ in St. Burchardi church, Halberstadt, is playing over 639 years.
The music comes from rules written by SparrowLegs, a random number generator and a synthesizer. It uses no AI model.
Watch
Live on YouTube, and also on Twitch.
For the audio alone, at full quality, listen to the Kalpaplayer radio stream. It also works in most radio and music apps that take a stream address.
Every day is archived in full on the Internet Archive.