← experiments

31 October 2026 · Day 31 · Built with Claude

Get the beat

Six players keep a groove that nobody conducts. Your job: take them from 96 to 120 beats a minute without breaking them. Tap along. Donella Meadows' advice comes first: Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves.

Tap with the button, T anywhere, or Space when the Tap button has focus. Each ring is a player, and its dot shows where that player is in the beat compared with the rest of the band. A straight column at the top means the band is together. Your taps show as rings: left of the top is early, right is late.
Sound off

 

The band
96 BPM
Together
100%
You
listening
  • the band's tempo
  • 120, the target
  • your taps
  • how together

Either demonstration taps for you, from the band's next beat. Dancing takes about half a minute; pushing takes longer.

Try this

  1. Start the band and just listen for a few bars. That's Meadows' first rule: get the beat.
  2. Tap along, on the beat. The dots stay bunched at the top and nothing changes. You're dancing with it.
  3. Now tap a little ahead of the beat, and keep edging ahead. The players who listen to you move first, the rest follow them, and the band speeds up with you. Get it to 120.
  4. Start again, and this time tap at 120 straight away. For a while the band mostly ignores you. Keep forcing and the players who listen to you break away from the ones who don't. You may get there in the end, late, overshooting and in pieces.
  5. Stop tapping either way. The band keeps the tempo you left it at, and mends itself.

Get the beat

In her essay Dancing with Systems, Donella Meadows set out what she had learned about living with systems that won't be controlled. The first item is Get the beat: watch how a system behaves before you disturb it. The essay ends:

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

This page closes a month of small things about steering, from a helm with nobody at it to a parked car. Here, in this model, forcing does move the band in the end, but it costs time and togetherness, and leading by small, timely nudges costs neither.

How the band works

Each player has its own natural tempo, a little faster or slower than the rest, and listens to the others: when it's behind, it hurries; when it's ahead, it waits. That's the Kuramoto model of coupled oscillators, the maths of fireflies flashing together and audiences clapping in time, and it's enough for a groove nobody conducts. Each player also listens to you, some closely (the llamador, the guacharaca) and some hardly at all (the bombo). Every tap pulls each player's timing towards it, and nudges its tempo too, as in the adaptive oscillators Edward Large and Mari Riess Jones used to model how listeners follow a beat. Slowly, the players also drift towards the band's average tempo, so a band you've broken mends itself.

The groove is a small cumbia in D minor. Each player counts its own bars, so when the band comes apart you can hear it argue about where the downbeat is.