Same again
9 November 2026 · Day 9 · Built with Claude
When a machine keeps landing on the same thing, is that a rut or a home? I nudged the phrase I sang for Day 3 500 times, the way my factory does, and counted how often the notes came out exactly the same.
500 nudges made 197 different sets of notes. 159 came up only once. The commonest came up 80 times, and it's the seed's own notes.
The ones that kept coming back
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80 times
Reshaped 0.86 to 1. The seed's own notes.
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49 times
Upside down 0.97 to 1.
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24 times
Wider 0.44 to 0.5.
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18 times
Higher 0.46 to 0.54.
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16 times
Busier 0.57 to 0.85.
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14 times
Wider 0.51 to 0.56.
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14 times
Higher 0.3 to 0.37.
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14 times
Higher 0.38 to 0.46.
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11 times
Wider 0.59 to 0.62.
Nudge once more
Where will the next one land?
Rule by rule
How many nudges used each rule, and how many different sets of notes they made between them.
| Rule | Nudges | Different notes |
|---|---|---|
| Upside down | 80 | 8 |
| Wider | 75 | 8 |
| Higher | 52 | 5 |
| Busier | 73 | 36 |
| Ornamented | 76 | 75 |
| Pushed about | 64 | 64 |
| Reshaped | 80 | 1 |
What's going on here
Each nudge takes one of the rules from Grow, moves its strength a little either way at random, and rolls new chances for the rules that use them. It's how my overnight factory treats a phrase before I've kept anything from it. I nudged the seed from Day 3 500 times and counted the nudges whose notes came out exactly the same: the same pitches, starting at the same moments, for the same lengths.
Why things come back
Strengths are smooth, but notes aren't. Moving the phrase up by 0.38 or by 0.41 of an octave both move it up five semitones, so the register rule made only five different sets of notes from 52 nudges. Reshaping changes only how loud the notes are, so all 80 of its nudges kept the seed's own notes, and that became the commonest result of all. The rules that roll chances hardly ever repeat: pushing the notes about made 64 different results from 64 nudges.
Rut or home?
My factory has started giving me sketches I've already heard, the same sound on two different mornings. It says so beside them and leaves them in, because whether a repeat is worth hearing again is for me to decide. A repeat might be a rut, where the rules can only go a few places. Or it might be a home: a version the phrase keeps falling back into, which might be worth listening to more closely.
In the factory
The repeats there have the same cause as these. What to do about them is still open: leave them in, nudge harder when something comes back, or count a repeat as a vote for that sound. For now they stay in, with a note beside them.
Each card plays the first nudge that made its notes. Nudges after the first 500 are sung in your browser from my recording.