Interactive composition silent

ΕΦΗΜΕΡΟΝ EPHEMERON

Each Ephemeron begins with the same conditions and acquires a different past. Its predecessors listened to concert halls. This one listens to what you write. Your words alter a music already in progress, though not always as you intend. No recording survives it. Close the page, and this particular performance ends.

  • LISTENING
  • ENACTED
  • PARTIAL
  • ABSORBED
  • REFUSED
  • OVERSHOT
  • DISPLACED
Fig. 1. The state of this Ephemeron: the Lorenz system that moves the eleven parameters, turning slowly. Your words enter at a point and fade as their influence fades. Dashed: the unheard history, the music without your words. Below it, this life so far, one mark per instruction.

An instruction

Your first instruction begins the music.

Your words enter the music at a particular moment; their effect depends on all that came before. Repeat a request and its influence gathers. Leave it alone and that influence fades. The reply measures the difference between the music that heard you and the music that would have continued without you.

What followed

IDLE

Nothing to report yet.

The music at this moment

Fig. 2. The eleven parameters as one shape. Dashed, for 1.8 seconds after an instruction: the same eleven in the unheard history. The red centre is κ, the coupling.
level overall loudness 0.000
rate speed of events 0.000
brightness dark to bright 0.000
density 1 to 8 voices 0.000
noise tonal to noisy 0.000
motion stillness to agitation 0.000
pitch low to high 0.000
articulation staccato to legato 0.000
space dry to distant 0.000
tension consonant to dissonant 0.000
distortion clean to saturated 0.000
κ COUPLING 0.120

steady. Coupling measures how far your words reach into the music. It grows when you listen and revise; haste and repetition weaken it.

Record 0 entries

There is no record yet. Each entry keeps your words, the changes measured in the next 1.8 seconds, and the coupling at that moment.

    This is the trace of the music, not the music itself. It remains in this browser; nothing is uploaded. Export saves a text copy. Clear erases the record. Neither can bring back what you heard.

    Colophon

    Phivos-Angelos Kollias, 2026. A later incarnation of Ephemeron (ZKM Karlsruhe, 2008). Its sound is synthesized in your browser, from a fixed seed, without recordings or random input. What differs from one performance to another is the timing of your words. For every instruction, the system calculates a second, unheard history: what the music would have done had you remained silent. It compares the two. On iOS, js/engine.js plays a brief silent signal to enable audio.

    Your words and the record remain in this browser; they are not sent to a server. Anyone who uses the same browser may read them. Export makes a text copy; Clear erases the stored record. Closing the tab ends this Ephemeron. Reloading does not bring it back. It begins another.