PILOT
KALPAPLAYER
a SparrowLegs piece
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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 3,300 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. Javanese days use gamelan tuning.
- 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.