The Psychedelic
Collection

Pyramid is a Galton board made musical. A triangle of nodes is built from the seed — row one holds a single node, row two holds two, and so on down to the base. A playhead enters at the apex and falls a single row per tick, and at each node it branches left or right. Where it lands decides the note.

BIAS is the tilt of the board. At dead centre the descent is a coin toss and, over many passes, the landings pile up in the middle exactly as a bell curve says they should — you hear the middle of the range far more often than the edges. Push BIAS to either side and the whole distribution slides with it, so the melody's centre of gravity moves.

The lattice itself is fixed by SEED, so a given seed always gives the same field of open and gated nodes; DENSITY decides how many of them are live. Land on a gated node and you get a rest, which is what stops a continuous descent turning into a continuous stream of notes.

Up to nine playheads can fall at once, each with its own bias, chaos, speed and MIDI channel — so one instance can send a fast, chaotic top line to one synth and a slow, centred bass to another. The histogram along the base counts landings and fades at the rate set by DECAY.

Acid is a bassline machine in the 303 tradition, with one important difference: nothing here is rolled fresh. Every step's pitch, slide, accent and octave are a deterministic hash of the seed and that step's index. Turning DENSITY, SLIDE or ACCENT doesn't reroll the pattern — it reshapes the line you already have, raising or lowering the threshold each step is tested against.

That is what makes the controls musical rather than a lottery. Push SLIDE up and the same line acquires glides, always at the same places, always the places that suited it. Pull it back and they retreat in the same order. You can dial in exactly as much of a behaviour as you want and never lose the phrase.

Slides tie into the following note, stretching its gate so the two run together as one long portamento gesture. Accents fire harder and open the filter. CUTOFF, RESO and ENV MOD are sent as MIDI CC so a downstream synth's filter tracks the line — that is where the classic squelch comes from, and every one of the three CC numbers is yours to set.

EVOLVE mutates a single step once per bar, so the line creeps rather than loops. The three LFO strips under the crawler modulate the same three CCs, and they are real parameters: the host can automate them and presets carry them.

The Tonnetz is a real object from music theory: a lattice where moving one way raises a fifth and another way raises a major third, so every triangle in the grid is a triad and every neighbouring triangle is a chord one note away. Tonnetz walks it.

The moves are the classical neo-Riemannian transforms. P flips major to minor on the same root. L and R slide to the leading-tone and relative neighbours. N, S and H are compounds — bigger, stranger jumps. Each has its own weight, so you are shaping a probability distribution over harmonic moves rather than picking chords.

Four modes decide how the next move is chosen. WALK picks by weight every pulse. MARKOV remembers the last move and chains from it, which produces recognisable progressions rather than a random tour. GRAVITY treats the lattice as a landscape of wells and lets a particle fall between them. EUCLID moves only on the pulses of a Euclidean rhythm E(k,16).

OUTPUT decides what the walk actually plays: the full chord, an arpeggio through it, just the root as a bassline, or a sustained pad. ARP TYPE and PAD HOLD shape those last two. The trail behind the triangle shows where the harmony has been.

Every step in Quantum is in superposition until a playhead reaches it. Its probability of firing is not a stored value but the height of a three-wave interference pattern at that point — which is why the display shows rippling standing waves rather than a row of switches, and why the pattern has structure rather than being noise.

When a playhead measures a step, it collapses to a note or a rest by the Born rule, and stays collapsed for as long as DECOHERE says. Until it decoheres, that step is a fixed fact and will repeat. After it decoheres it returns to the wave and can behave differently next time round. The whole feel of the generator lives in this one number.

Entangled pairs are the second mechanism. Pair two steps and measuring one forces the other's outcome, which stitches long-range structure into an otherwise probabilistic pattern. ENTANGLE is how strongly that correlation holds.

WORLDS are not decoration: each is a real playhead with its own tunnelling, bias, leaps and MIDI channel, sweeping the same probability landscape and reaching different conclusions about it. Set WORLDS to 3 and you have three instruments disagreeing about the same piece of music.

Fractal is the collection's purest statement of the idea that the picture is the sequencer. A Euclidean pulse E(k,n) walks a wide scale, and every note it plays pushes a voice into a live list. The raymarcher reads that list directly: note energy becomes the glow, each attack becomes an impact in the geometry, pitch drives the hue rotation.

Musically it is the simplest engine here — a Euclidean rhythm spread over a scale — and that is deliberate. It gives you an even, mathematically-distributed pulse that works as a bed under anything, while the visual does the heavy lifting.

MOTION is what saves it from being a ramp. The pad originally walked one degree upward per hit and nothing else, so every phrase was the same rising line; now it can descend, alternate, stumble drunkenly or jump freely, and INTERVAL decides how far each move goes. Set INTERVAL to 2 for a pattern in thirds, or 4 for something that sounds like a broken chord.

The VISUAL group has no effect on the notes. FOLD is the geometry itself: how many times space is folded back on itself before rendering, which is the difference between a plain pyramid and an infinitely detailed object.

E8 is the largest exceptional Lie group, and its 240 root vectors, projected down onto the Coxeter plane, make one of the most beautiful objects in mathematics: eight concentric rings of thirty points each, in perfect eightfold symmetry. That projection is the sequencer.

The field is divided into SHELLS (the rings) and SLICES (positions around them). Each node is armed or not by a deterministic hash of its shell, its slot and the seed, tested against DENSITY. The playhead sweeps one slice per tick like a radar line, and every armed node it crosses fires at once.

Because a slice cuts through all shells simultaneously, this engine produces chords by construction — the more shells you enable, the thicker the stack. PITCH MAP decides how those simultaneous notes are voiced: from the ring position, from the shell number, from projected depth, or from the slice itself.

PLANES sets how many projections are rendered and swept at once, and each is a playhead of its own: give one plane a Shell map with wide octaves and another a Ring map with a short gate, and a single instance produces both the pad and the sparkle above it.

Hallucination is the only generator you write for. You put a melody into the journal in the lower half — draw it, play it in, or drop a MIDI file on it — and the engine retells it, once per loop, forever. Every retelling is slightly wrong, and the errors compound.

Each note carries a confidence that erodes at the rate set by MEMORY. As confidence falls, that note fails in a specific order: first its velocity drifts, then its timing slips, then its pitch, then it jumps an octave, and finally it is forgotten altogether — dropped into a pool from which FALSE MEM can resurrect it, wrong.

Against that decay sit two forces of correction. LUCIDITY snaps a note back toward what you actually wrote. RECOGNISE biases pitch slips homeward, so when a note does drift it drifts toward something that still belongs. Between them you can hold the melody at any point on the spectrum from faithful to unrecognisable.

The corridor above shows the last ten generations receding toward the vanishing point, where your original hangs on its plaque. Notes trail smoke as they recede — the thicker the smoke, the less certain the note. Above the front row runs the echo delay line, whose taps can MATERIALISE into real notes and join the chain as though they had always been part of the tune.

Maze is the most physical generator in the collection. A grid is strewn with gems and objects, and up to eight bots travel through it. A bot moving in a straight line is silent; it only speaks when it hits something. Strike a gem and it sounds a note. Hit a wall and it rebounds. Hit a prism and it splits into two bots travelling different ways.

Because everything is a collision, the rhythm is emergent. You are not programming a pattern — you are building a room and letting things bounce around it. Change one wall and the whole piece reorganises, sometimes subtly, sometimes completely.

Every bot is an independent playhead with its own movement, note and object probabilities, its own speed, velocity, octave and MIDI channel. That is what makes Maze a full arrangement rather than one line: a slow, quiet bot on channel 2 and a fast, loud one on channel 1 are a bassline and a lead from the same room.

The four wall lanes sound their own degrees as bots strike them, each with its own octave, probability and degree mode — SEQ steps through a sequence, FIX holds one degree, RANDOM picks freely between DEG LO and DEG HI. With the default octaves (N 4, E 3, S 2, W 3) the room is already tuned as a chord.