When you do not drive

Two interleaved spiral lanes, one ember and one blue, carry the levels of two renders of one song toward a crossing point.

The song

Two renders, one melody

The score

The picture

Controls

What this establishes

Sources

The song

The two renders were made 84 seconds apart from the same lyrics:

Oh  Oh  Oh  Oh  Oh  Oh  Oh
Well
Well
Well now
Here we are
Here we are
Waiting among the cars
The cars with the invisible driver
The car with the driver who does not drive
You're wondering why
I coughed and sputtered
What else is there to do
When you no longer drive
When you no longer drive
When you no longer drive
What is there to do
But to cough
And sputter
And ooh
Oh
Oh

Separated from its accompaniment, the earlier render's voice falls into 21 sung phrases. Read one to one, they hold the last opening Oh and the 20 lines that follow, and the three When you no longer drive lines then last 2.92, 2.67 and 2.91 s. The same reading shifted by one phrase leaves a line unsung. The placement comes from counts and durations, not speech recognition. Times are seconds into each render; · marks a line that render does not sing there.

Line	Earlier render	Later render
Oh	·	4.8–6.4
Oh	·	8.8–11.0
Oh	·	20.9–21.7
Oh	25.1–25.8	25.9–26.6
Well	27.2–28.6	28.0–29.4
Well	31.7–34.5	32.1–34.6
Well now	38.9–40.1	38.7–40.0
Here we are	41.7–43.3	41.3–42.8
Here we are	44.6–46.0	44.0–45.4
Waiting among the cars	47.4–48.9	46.8–48.3
The cars with the invisible driver	50.2–52.9	49.5–52.2
The car with the driver who does not drive	53.9–56.8	53.3–56.2
You're wondering why	57.3–61.1	56.7–60.7
I coughed and sputtered	62.6–63.9	62.2–63.7
What else is there to do	64.7–66.4	64.4–66.1
When you no longer drive	67.7–70.6	67.4–70.3
When you no longer drive	71.5–74.1	71.2–74.0
When you no longer drive	76.7–79.6	76.8–79.6
What is there to do	80.3–82.0	80.3–82.0
But to cough	82.8–83.4	82.8–83.4
And sputter	85.1–85.9	84.9–85.7
And ooh	87.3–91.4	87.0–91.1
Oh	94.3–96.8	93.8–96.4
Oh	100.6–102.8	·

Two renders, one melody

The renders share a tonal centre (D♯, the most frequent bass note in both), a tempo (123.05 beats per minute) and a form. A time-warping path between them stays within a slope of 2/3 to 3/2 over 88.8% of its length. They sing the same melody at almost the same moments: phrase starts differ by at most 0.72 s, and an alignment map brings them within 0.49 s. They differ in arrangement, intro and ending. The earlier render ends on C, the later on D♯.

Consonance between them, the mean cosine of their beat chroma with one delayed, falls steadily with the delay:

Delay in beats	0	½	1	2	3	4	6	8
Consonance	0.794	0.748	0.696	0.621	0.575	0.543	0.521	0.521

The terraces use the delays 8, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1 and ½ in that order, so each terrace is measurably more consonant than the one below it and the summit's unison most of all. Whether listeners hear chroma cosine as consonance has not been tested.

The score

Station	Time	Sound	How the renders play each other
Lament	0:00–1:40	The earlier render's voice runs backward from its last phrase and the later one's runs forward from its first, both slowed to half speed at their own pitch. An organ pedal descends D♯ D C♯ C B and holds A♯; a bell on D♯ with a minor-third partial tolls 14 times.	A crab canon. The past and the future meet at the same moment of the song, in The car with the driver who does not drive.
Gate	1:40–1:51	Each mix frozen at the meeting point into a sustained chord; the organ resolves to D♯.	The meeting held.
Purgatorio	1:51–3:15	Seven terraces at speeds 9/16 to 15/16, the harmonic series from the lament's 8/16 to the summit's 16/16. Tempo and pitch rise together, and the voices keep their formants. An A♯ pedal holds under the seventh terrace.	The renders take turns leading. The other enters with the same phrase 8 beats later on the first terrace and half a beat later on the seventh.
Summit	3:15–3:30	Both full mixes at their own speed and pitch over a D♯ pedal, from And ooh.	Unison: the later render is warped onto the earlier one's clock, and their onsets align within 10 ms.
Paradiso	3:30–5:38	Each render's last high Oh and the later render's opening Ohs stretched until they stop moving, with both endings. Nine spheres at harmonics 2 to 16 of D♯: resonators fed by those clouds, a quiet tone and a chime struck n times per 15.6 s cycle.	Every sphere strikes together once a cycle. At 4:58 the wheels lock and strike as one chord every 7.8 s.

The picture

Both renders are inscribed as two lanes of one spiral road, one turn per 8 s of song. Each point carries its moment's voice and band level, brightness and sung pitch, which raises the lane into a relief of the melody. The road is a funnel in the lament, a terraced mountain in purgatory and nine rings in paradise. Playheads are lights, white going forward and red going backward, and they leave long-exposure trails. When one render sounds, the other lane lights at the corresponding moment, and a thread between paired playheads brightens when both sing. Each knell sends a ring through the funnel. Three rings of white, violet and red mark the gate. Seven flames on the mountain go out as each terrace is climbed, and a wall of fire circles the seventh. In paradise the rings turn at their harmonic speeds around a point of light and open into five petals as the wheels lock.

Controls

Control	Effect
Circle	Begin; its ring fills as the audio arrives
▶ / ❚❚	Play or pause; tapping the picture does the same
Line with three marks	Position: funnel, terraces, ring; click or drag to move
Ember and pale dots	Mute the earlier or the later render
Green dot	Add your own sound file: backward and slowed in the lament, at each terrace's speed, plain at the summit, into the spheres' resonators
Corners	Full screen
Drag the picture	Steer through time; let go and it drives itself
Keys	Space, arrows, 1 2 3 for the three stations, f

What this establishes

This piece is play. Its measurements establish how the two renders relate and that the page computes what its score says: the engine's own offline renders of the whole piece are finite, unclipped and measure −14.3 LUFS. They do not establish how the piece sounds to a person. Whether the lament is mournful, the climb effortful or the ending bright is open, as is whether a listener reads the stations in that order.

The vocals were separated by a public network of the KUIELab MDX-Net design. Bleed from the accompaniment colours the stretched voices. The first terrace transposes the voices almost ten semitones down with their formants preserved, and whether that keeps them human to a listener is untested. Bells, organ and chimes are synthesised in the browser, and the reverberation is a generated impulse rather than a measured hall.

When you do not drive?

The song?

Two renders, one melody?

The score?

The picture?

Controls?

What this establishes?

Sources?

When you do not drive

The song

Two renders, one melody

The score

The picture

Controls

What this establishes

Sources