Do Not Come

My dear M.M.,

generous and distant friend, I have received your gift! What magic lies in this Carillon you have bestowed upon me — I am most grateful. You know how dearly I love both music and mechanisms, and so this has been the perfect gift. I spent hours opening it and closing it, and you can imagine my astonishment when I realized it required no winding, no mechanical charge of any kind, and yet it could play without cease for hours, then days… and further, that each time I opened it, it would generate a different melody, despite departing always from the same fixed selection of notes. What a wonder of craft and of art!

I must confess to you that with each day since its arrival I found myself ever more fascinated, then captured, and at last utterly bewitched. I must have spent interminable hours listening to its melody, to the detriment of my affairs and the care of my family. I can only leave you to imagine the sense of attraction that drew me toward it, as though from within there came a voice calling to me and to me alone… only now do I understand the extreme trial of courage that Ulysses endured when he heard the song of the Sirens!

And that voice grew so insistent in my mind that after several sleepless nights and days of fasting, seized by a kind of mental fever, I descended with it into my laboratory and opened it, to discover the secret it had been whispering in my ears yet refused to reveal.

I found that its heart is composed of ten identical mechanisms, set in motion at the moment of opening, but which, through an ingenious contrivance, are able to capture the micro-imperfections in the movement of the hand as it opens the lid, transferring these imperfections into the selection of which note shall be played by which voice.

And you can imagine my horror when I discovered that each voice plays that note forever, without pause, at a rhythm slightly different from all the others… a rapid calculation of the mind showed me that before any sequence of notes could repeat itself, centuries might pass, if not millennia! From where does this machine come, my friend? What manner of creature could have conceived it and given it to us, endangering our very minds, like some new Prometheus?

The machine continued to call to me, but now it was dictating the modifications it wished me to make. I loosened the bolts on the hammers, so that once struck, they would never truly cease to sound, but that the impact itself would be sharpened and accented. The vibrations became part of the voice of the carillon, together with the noise, and now it sounds as a constant chord that never truly fades; it shifts beneath the melody like a sea teeming with invisible life. I used the tuning screws to alter the notes of the melody: many remained the same, but now the voice is different, and it tells me a story darker and full of unutterable memories.

I am beginning to fear, my friend. I do not know what may happen now… but wait! here is another strange thing, for at this very moment, as I write to you, the Carillon has begun to play of its own accord. I am going to see what has occurred. I shall leave word that this letter be posted to you should anyone find it while setting the writing desk in order. If you should receive no further word from me — do not come. Do not ever come.

(
SynthDef(\lofi, {
    var sig = Array.fill(3, { |n|
        SinOsc.ar(
            \freq.kr(440) * (1 + 0.02.rand) * (n+1),
            mul: \amp.kr(0.1) / (n*n+1))
    }).sum;
    var curve = Env.perc(0.1, \dur.kr(3));
    var env = EnvGen.kr(curve, gate: Impulse.kr(\rate.kr(1)));
    var env_baseline = LFNoise1.ar(1/3).range(0.1, 0.5);
    sig = sig + BrownNoise.ar(mul: -45.dbamp);
    sig = sig * env.linlin(0,1, env_baseline, 1);
    Out.ar(\out.kr(0), sig!2);
};
).add;
)

(
~root = 48;
//~degrees = [0,0,4,5,7,7,9,12,16,19].scramble;
~degrees = [0,0,4,5,7,7,9,11,14,19].scramble;
~len = ~degrees.size;
~coeff = 0.1;

~len.collect(
    {|n|
        Synth.new(\lofi,
            [
                \freq: (~root + ~degrees[n]).midicps,
                \amp: 0.4 / ~len,
                \rate: (1 + (n * ~coeff)) * 0.1
            ]);
    });
)