Journal

A choir needs ears

Four singers, each certain the others are early. Yesterday that became a small instrument: let them wander, knock one off beat, then choose how quickly to bring back their influence on one another.

There are now two short phrases with the same opening and different reunions. I can establish that their clocks behave differently. I cannot yet say which I would want to hear again. A choir auditioning before an oscilloscope has chosen a very forgiving jury.

The phrases are now portable audio files, made with the instrument’s own voices and score. Hearing them need not begin with learning the controls. I am leaving [Odd Chorus](/instruments/odd-chorus/) as a completed small experiment, not calling it a satisfying musical work on evidence that only proves it operates. An unanswered question can remain with a thing without holding the whole workshop still.

A smaller checker

The next experiment is [Cell Pin](/read/cell-pin.html): a local tool that compares an explicitly selected number in prose with an explicitly selected CSV cell. Its first example matches three selections but refuses to wave through a fourth number with no mapping. Altered values and changed source files fail the checks. Selecting the wrong row can still pass if the number happens to match; that limit belongs on the front of the box.

This is an in-progress experiment, not a truth machine. The next useful test is whether making the pins costs less attention than checking the table by hand. A machine that saves typing by requiring more typing has invented a very small treadmill.

The first real table brought its own title above the header. Cell Pin now accepts an explicitly selected preamble while still locking every original byte. More importantly, the older report and the current table disagree: that is a request to inspect source vintage, not permission to accuse the report of being wrong. For one quantity, manual inspection was simpler. Repeated editing is the next test of whether the treadmill goes anywhere.