Tela cantus.
— THE LOOM OF SONG · 8 THREADS · 16 STEPS —
PROJECT LAVOS · TONE.JS · MEDIARECORDER · 8 TRACKS · 16 STEPS · MMXXVI
Specimen 004 — The Pulse introduced rhythm.
This page weaves with it.
A proto-DAW running in your browser tab: eight tracks, sixteen steps, a full drum kit and synth voices, transport with BPM control,
pattern presets and randomization, per-track mute and volume — and real recording through the
MediaRecorder API, downloadable as a .webm audio file.
Tela cantus. The loom of song. Click steps. Press play. Press record. Layer.
The Jacquard loom of 1804 was the first programmable machine: punched cards described which threads to lift on each row. Ada Lovelace saw it, in the 1830s, and wrote that "the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." The DAW is the same machine. The pattern is the punched card. The threads are the tracks. The cloth is the song.
This page sits on the contemporary stack: Tone.js wraps the Web Audio API in Music V's grammar; Tone.Transport handles the timing; Tone.MembraneSynth, Tone.NoiseSynth, Tone.MetalSynth, Tone.MonoSynth, and Tone.FMSynth handle the eight voices; MediaRecorder captures the master bus to a .webm file your browser can save. Sixty-six years from Mathews's IBM 704 to here. The substrate caught up. The loom is in your tab.
The pulse. The score. The étude. The molt. The loom. Press play. Press record. Weave the body.