7 October 2026 · Built with Claude
Four hundred people trade at random, starting equal. Every bar, a string quartet plays the state of their wealth: the richest quarter on first violin, the poorest on cello. Wealth buys notes. How the voices share the music follows how the people share the money.
counterpoint
Bar shape: phrase opens
The score appears here as the bars are written.
Each bar, the 400 people are sorted by wealth and split into four equal groups, one per instrument. A group's share of all the wealth decides how many notes its player gets in the bar: an equal share is four quavers, a monopoly is all eight, nothing is a bar's rest. Its share also sets its dynamic, from piano to forte.
The Gini index chooses the texture. Below 0.3, everyone plays the same line in octaves: unison. Between 0.3 and 0.6, each player has an independent line and the subject passes from voice to voice: counterpoint. Between 0.6 and 0.8, the first violin has the tune and the others hold chords underneath: homophony. Above 0.8, the first violin plays alone over a cello drone: monody. The size of the economy sets the tempo and how many notes there are to share, so a shrinking economy slows and thins towards silence.
How it is played: bars group into four-bar phrases. Each phrase grows towards its third bar and falls away into the fourth, which also slows a little. Downbeats lean, higher notes sing out, and no two notes have quite the same loudness, tuning, vibrato or timing. Louder notes are bowed brighter, with a touch of bow noise on the attack. The quartet sits across the stereo field, first violin on the left and cello on the right, in a small room. When one voice has the tune, the others play softer underneath.
The economics underneath is the yard-sale model with Bruce Boghosian's wealth advantage and redistribution terms, plus a simple production loop. The two contested sliders decide which extreme fails; the music just makes it audible. The ABC text can be pasted into any ABC tool to print parts for real players.