Keep
7 November 2026 · Day 7 · Built with Claude, on 9 November
What does choosing teach a machine, and what does it miss? Six sketches of the phrase I sang for Day 3. Keep the ones you like, and six more grow from them.
The seed
One take of me singing.
Keep one or more, then grow six more from them.
With JavaScript on, you can keep some of these and grow six more from them.
Round 1
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Round 1, sketch 1: Higher 0.42
From the seed.
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Round 1, sketch 2: Upside down 1
From the seed.
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Round 1, sketch 3: Wider 0.5
From the seed.
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Round 1, sketch 4: Pushed about 0.8
From the seed.
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Round 1, sketch 5: Busier 0.7
From the seed.
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Round 1, sketch 6: Ornamented 0.7
From the seed.
Where the rules have moved
How strongly each round used each rule, on average over its six. Below 0 means lower, narrower or thinned.
| Rule | Round 1 |
|---|---|
| Upside down | 0.17 |
| Wider or narrower | 0.08 |
| Higher or lower | 0.07 |
| Busier or thinned | 0.12 |
| Ornamented | 0.12 |
| Pushed about | 0.13 |
| Reshaped | 0 |
What's going on here
Six sketches of the phrase I sang for Day 3, each changed by one of the rules from Grow and sung in my own voice, re-pitched note by note. Keep the ones you like, then grow six more. Each new sketch starts from one you kept, with every rule's strength nudged a little at random, and now and then it picks up a rule it didn't have. Keep again, grow again.
The table shows how strongly each round used each rule, on average. Keep the upside-down ones and "Upside down" climbs. That's everything the machine learns from you: numbers about rules.
What it can't learn
It never knows why you kept something. Some of the rules use chance: Pushed about moves each note by a random amount, and Busier and Ornamented choose at random where to add notes. A new sketch keeps the strength but rolls new chances, so if you kept one for where a single note landed, the next round probably won't have it. The same keeps always grow the same next round, so it can be repeated, but it can't tell a sketch kept for its rhythm from one kept for its range. A keep says what I liked, never why.
In the factory
This is the loop my overnight factory runs a crop at a time. I move the sketches I like into a Keep folder, and the next morning's crop grows around them: some nudged like these, others taking the kept sketch's own sound as a new seed. What I haven't solved is how to say why I kept something, with no more effort than moving a file.
Round 1 is the six single-rule sketches from Day 4. Later rounds are sung in your browser from my recording, seed.wav.