Device Details
Overview
| Name | Version: | SYZYGY 1.0 |
| Author: | Spiritseed |
| Device Type: | MIDI Effect |
| Description: | Put two pendulum clocks on the same wall and within days they swing in step. Fireflies along a river in Thailand flash in unison by the thousands, no conductor. And a hall full of people clapping will find a common pulse all by itself. Physics has an equation for this: the Kuramoto model. SYZYGY puts that equation on a MIDI track. THE COFFEE PARAGRAPH (IT LIVES UP HERE BECAUSE NOBODY READS THE BOTTOM) SYZYGY is free, and it stays that way. But a quick statistic: my last device was downloaded 70 times, and the number of coffees bought along the way is holding steady at zero — a drought that makes the interstellar vacuum look moist. So if SYZYGY fills your room for a night: one coffee is enough, and for a moment two celestial bodies — you and me — stand in a line. Astronomy calls that a syzygy. I call it breakfast. ☕ Any amount, card/Apple Pay works without a PayPal account: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/RDH3LCEHQ3ZGQ WHAT'S RUNNING A swarm of 3 to 32 oscillators — voices — runs in circles, each at its own tempo. Every time a voice completes a lap, it plays a note. The most important knob is K: how strongly the voices listen to each other. K down: everyone ticks alone. A drizzle of notes. Turn K up: the voices start pulling at each other — and at some point the swarm locks in. Drizzle becomes groove. That transition isn't programmed. No random generator, no probability table. It's emergent — the same self-organization as the fireflies, in real time, under your fingers. And because the swarm never locks in exactly the same way twice, every moment is unique, yet never arbitrary. THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, TAKEN LITERALLY Where do the voices get their tempos? From the sky. The presets are real orbital resonances: — Laplace: Io, Europa, Ganymede — Jupiter's moons in their famous 4:2:1. The cleanest groove in the solar system, stable for four billion years. — TRAPPIST-1: seven Earth-sized planets in a single resonance chain (8:5, 5:3, 3:2, 3:2, 4:3, 3:2) — the most complex system known; it stays alive forever. — Kepler-223: four planets in 3:4:6:8. — HD 110067: six planets, the perfect chain (3:2, 3:2, 3:2, 4:3, 4:3), discovered in 2023. — TOI-178, Pluto and its moons, Saturn's moons (pairs of 2:1, 2:1, 4:3) — and Chaos, for when you want to leave the sky. In RATIO pitch mode, each voice's tempo ratio becomes its pitch — the astronomy becomes literally audible: Laplace plays pure octaves, because 4:2:1 IS octaves. (Switch to INDEX and the voices simply climb the scale.) R — THE ONE NUMBER EVERYTHING ORBITS The swarm has a single measurement: the order parameter R, its "agreement" from 0 (chaos) to 1 (perfect unison). You watch it in the orrery on the left: every voice circles on its own orbit (fast ones inside, slow ones outside), and the central star smolders in chaos and BLAZES as the swarm locks in. Then a thin line appears through the center: the syzygy — the moment celestial bodies align. It gives the device its name. IT DOESN'T JUST PLAY — IT MOVES YOUR KNOBS Eight modulation slots modeled on Ableton's LFO: click "Map", touch any control in Live, done — the button shows the target's name. The sources aren't LFOs; they are the swarm itself: — R: the agreement — slow, narrative. A filter that opens as the groove finds itself. — Psi: the group phase — a soft LFO at swarm tempo. — Voice 1–8: individual voices as free, drifting LFOs. — Breath: the breathing (see below). — Flux: spikes when the swarm is locking in or falling apart — a transition detector. — Density: how densely the swarm is playing right now. Each slot has Min/Max (invertible), modulates non-destructively via live.remote~ (no undo clutter — the knob stays yours), and shows its live value as a moon phase: new moon = minimum, full moon = maximum. IT BREATHES "breathe" is on out of the box: a predator–prey system (Lotka–Volterra — the mathematics of fox and hare populations) moves K by itself. The swarm gathers, falls apart, gathers again — endless arcs that never repeat. Ambient beds that tell their own story; the rate goes down to almost a standstill. And if you'd rather tell K's story yourself, just switch the breathing off. AND IT STAYS MUSICAL — 22 scales (church modes to Hirajoshi, In-Sen, blues, a fifths drone) — no wrong note possible. — Cadenza: when the agreement crosses a threshold, a chord sounds ONCE — and not again until the swarm has fallen apart in between. Musical form, built from physics. — Tempo sync: the timescale follows your song (8/1 down to 1/16, dotted values included) while the swarm stays free — no grid quantization. — Transport-anchored swing, gate, two velocity modes (agreement or voice speed). — 12 preset slots, saved with your Live set. THE LOOK Everything you see is drawn procedurally — not a single image file: the star field (150 deterministically placed stars), the nebula, the orrery, the moon phases. And each planetary system brings its own light: TRAPPIST-1 bathes the device in its red dwarf's glow, Saturn in pale ring-gold, HD 110067 in turquoise. TECH Ableton Live 12 with Max for Live, MIDI effect, fully self-contained (everything frozen into the .amxd). Deliberately lightweight: the simulation runs at control rate inside the v8 object; the only DSP is sig~ → live.remote~ per slot. The engine is covered by 99 automated tests — down to the conserved quantity of the predator–prey integrator. QUICK START (60 SECONDS) Drop it on a MIDI track, put a pad or pluck behind it, press play. Out of the box it runs TRAPPIST-1 in time-lapse (~100,000× at 120 BPM): seven voices, slow, breathing, with a touch of swing. Play K: to the left the swarm falls apart, to the right it locks in — the moment drizzle becomes groove. Click "Map", grab a filter cutoff, choose source R — the sound opens up as the swarm comes to an agreement. Step through the presets: every system brings its own light and its own character. The rest is listening. |
Details
| Live Version Used: | 12.0.5 |
| Max Version Used: | 8.6.2 |
| Date Added: | Jul 09 2026 20:15:54 |
| Date Last Updated: | No Updates |
| Downloads: | 11 |
| ⓘ License: | AttributionShareAlike |
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Files
| Device File: | SYZYGY.amxd |
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