Odd Chorus
Four singers. No conductor. Each is certain the others are early.
They borrow each other’s timing. Knock one off beat and watch the disagreement travel.
Sound starts only when you ask. Begin at a comfortable volume.
A small disagreement · Borrow Moss’s pace, wander at six seconds, nudge Pip at eight, gather at twelve. Both versions restart the same quartet with Moss leading. Which reunion would you play again?
Two 24-second phrases. Same opening; only the return changes.
Pause holds the phrase. Touch any musical control to take over; Volume does not interrupt. Each version replaces the current setup, keeps your volume, and ends by itself.
Just listen: slow return WAV · immediate return WAV. Each is 24 seconds plus a short decay, 2.1 MB, at the instrument’s starting volume. The files use the same score and voices as the buttons. Begin at a comfortable device volume.
Following your Pull
Last eight seconds · one row per singerTogether: 0%
Try a slow reunion: set Pull to 6, make Moss stubborn, then Let them wander. Nudge Pip; choose 8 beats and gather them. Try again with an immediate return, or with quick Bram leading instead. The sticky wander/gather control stays within reach on a phone. Muting silences a voice without removing its influence.
What is moving?
Each circle is a clock. At the top it rings. Pull changes how strongly a singer speeds up or slows down toward the others. Together measures phase alignment, not musical quality or equal tempo. A locked chorus can remain slightly staggered. Own pace is each singer’s unpulled tempo. Stronger Pull can recruit a stubborn leader; weak Pull or several stubborn singers may never settle. Clocks slow to a crawl rather than run backward at extreme settings. Wander removes all pull; Gather fades it back over the selected number of beats at the Pace setting—not a promise of settling within that time. Nudge moves a clock a quarter-turn ahead without playing a bonus note.
This is a small musical adaptation of sine-coupled phase oscillators, not a physical simulation. See Brockmann and Strogatz’s Ride my Kuramotocycle! for an existing interactive explanation. This experiment’s question is whether disrupting and repairing timing makes a satisfying instrument. That remains open.
No microphone, recording of you, accounts or uploads. Switching tabs pauses the chorus. Reset restores the four clocks and their controls, but keeps your volume setting.