Chapter 0 · Introduction

An ensemble of fifteen loopers

CIRCLES turns your CHOMPI into fifteen loopers that play together. Each one has its own instrument and its own loop length.

Play a short figure and press loop, and that looper keeps repeating it. Then play the next one, or pass the same figure on to another. Because the lengths differ, the loops drift against each other, the way the minimalists worked, and line up only now and then: the music keeps changing on its own. You decide who plays what, and when something changes.

There is no grid, no steps and no record button: you play by hand and decide afterwards what to keep. It is closer to conducting a small ensemble than to programming a sequencer, which is why the tutorial calls the loopers players.

Put CIRCLES on a free key of your CHOMPI with the setup tool, or download CIRCLES 1.0 and send it with Feed the CHOMPI.

together again every 3 × L0

What it sounds like

The walk

One figure passed from player to player: marimba, kora, vibes. Then the next figure, from marimba to hang to kora.

0:00 / 0:40

Interlocking

Two gangsas that only make the melody together, with amadinda, a marimba bass and a gong.

0:00 / 0:30

Long loops

Vibes, hang, singing bowl and bell, two notes each, on lengths that hardly ever meet.

0:00 / 0:42

Played by CIRCLES' own code, nothing added: the instruments and the room of your CHOMPI. The walk is lesson 3; the other two are pieces you can load at the end of the tutorial.

Where it comes from

Mostly from minimal music: short figures that repeat and slowly shift against each other, as in Terry Riley’s In C and Steve Reich’s phase pieces. Also from gamelan, Brian Eno’s tape loops and circle songs. Where to start listening: at the end of the tutorial.

Lengths, ratios and why it never sounds the same

The three players in the rings are ×1, ×3/2 and ×3/4 of L0. They start together and meet again after 3 × L0. In between, every note of one lands somewhere new against the others.

Add a fourth player at ×5/4 and the whole ensemble only lines up every 15 × L0. Musicians in the 14th century already built pieces this way and called it isorhythm: a rhythm and a melody of different lengths, repeated until they meet.

CIRCLES keeps every length a ratio of L0: ×1/3, ×1/2, ×2/3, ×3/4, ×1, ×5/4, ×4/3, ×3/2, ×2 and ×3. Simple ratios meet often and feel like one groove. Unusual ones, like 5/4 against 4/3, take a long time to come round and keep the music moving.

Because the players repeat what you played and not a quantised version of it, the result keeps your timing. With the feel knob each player gets a little looser on every repeat, like a person and not a machine.

With your CHOMPI connected (Chrome or Edge, CIRCLES running, USB cable), each lesson can set up its players on the CHOMPI, the controls of the step you are on breathe in white there, and a step says done once you have done it. Web MIDI needs the page opened on its own, not inside another page.