Melodies become real. Your listening gives them weight.
Listen – just listening changes the piece. The longer you stay, the more weight you give to the notes that are sounding. When you leave, JCself grows bored and looks for new paths.
Give your name to the stream. Each letter touches a spot in all three fields, and everyone hears your name at once. If you like, it then stays under “Traces” with the date and time.
Click into a window. Each window is its own JCself: its notes there gain weight, and its field wins favour. Everyone listening hears it at once.
Each window is its own JCself with its own landscape and one voice – so each forms its own pattern. The voices follow the listener, even when nobody intervenes: wherever he is listening, windows gradually join, at most one every 20 seconds – a JCself moves over, landscape and all. An empty circle stands for a window a field has given away.
Soft sine plays pure sine tones, freely, exactly as JCself computes them: in a hundred steps per octave, without a tuning system, between the semitones too.
Crescionda plays the notes freely, exactly as JCself computes them. The landscapes of the swarm, all windows of the field taken together, become the timbre itself: the distance between their two highest peaks sets the frequency at which the notes are modulated, the height of all peaks how strongly – the higher the peaks, the richer the sound. So all voices of the field share one colour, and the same shape appears on the large scale, in the course of the whole piece, and on the small scale, inside every single note: self-similarity.
Gong: JCself computes its notes freely, in a hundred steps per octave, without a tuning system. Each note is played by the recording from Peter Heeren’s gong bank whose main tone lies closest to the computed note – as it is, never transposed, ringing out fully. Here the gong itself is the tuning system.
Weight – the higher, the more likely the noteFatigue – where much has sounded lately; weight wears away faster thereVoice – above its last note261.6Peak – its pitch in HzWindow – one JCself, from 65.4 Hz (left) to 1480.0 Hz (right)
Click a window to give weight to the notes of that JCself. Everyone hears it.
Many voices: the sound may stutter on weaker devices.
Together: all three fields sound – Soft sine on the left, Crescionda in the middle, the gong on the right.
Every change applies to everyone listening.
Whoever touches a landscape changes the stream – for everyone listening now, and for everything that comes after. The weight fades away, the trace remains.
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JCself Strom keeps playing without pause, since 1 November 2026 and without end. Strom is German for both stream and electric current: it plays as long as there is power. Melodies find their way: every voice follows a line in small steps, and the landscape has its say. Everything that happens here changes the probabilities with which JCself chooses the next notes. Even listening does: the longer someone stays, the more weight their attention gives to the notes that are sounding. Leaving does too: whoever leaves shows JCself boredom, and the stream looks for new paths. And whoever touches a landscape or gives their name gives weight to the notes there.
Three fields play at once: A Soft sine, B Crescionda and C Gong – each with its own swarm. As in the JCself program, a swarm is one setting taken many times: each small window is its own JCself with its own landscape and one voice, and each forms its own pattern. A listener listens to them and zaps between them: he always listens where he is surprised, until he grows used to it. Listen to all three together, or zapped, with him.
How A, B and C influence each other: They listen to one another. Each window hears each of the other two fields as a whole, half as strongly as its own voice: every note of a field leaves a trace in the windows of the others, on the same note, moved into the octave in which the window is playing. When the gong plays a note, that note becomes more likely for Soft sine and Crescionda too. So the three find their way to related notes, yet each stays in its own register. Within a swarm the windows listen to each other: each hears its whole swarm softly, on the same notes, and its two neighbours a little more clearly. So the swarm stays together in related registers, and still each window forms its own pattern. At the same time the fields compete for favour: the field with more favour gets windows from the others, at most one every 20 seconds. Each keeps at least half of its swarm. A field does not get louder for it: a large swarm grows denser, not louder. And the loudness follows the ear: high notes, to which the ear is more sensitive, sound a little softer in Soft sine and Crescionda, and the gong can always be heard clearly.
The voices follow the listener, even when nobody intervenes: the listener himself gives favour to the field he is listening to, all the time, even when no one is on the page. Voices gradually wander there, each with its window: the JCself takes its landscape along and plays on with the sound of its new field. When he zaps on, they wander after him. So the swarm of each field grows and shrinks by itself. On top of that comes what you do: listening to all three together gives all three the same favour, and the voices spread more evenly. Listening zapped means listening with the listener, and it gives the field where he is even more favour. A click into a window gives that JCself weight at that spot, gives its field a lot of favour at once and makes the listener prick up his ears too. Favour that no one renews fades bit by bit.
How the listener zaps: He always listens to one field only, the same for everyone. A field catches his attention when it surprises him: with a big leap, with a note that has much more or much less weight or sounds much longer or shorter than the notes before, and most of all with a peak of its landscape. The surprise fades within a few seconds. A field with many voices does not hold him just by their number. The longer he listens to a field, the more he gets used to it, clearly so after about ten seconds. A surprising note there refreshes him, and what he has not heard for a while becomes new to him again. His mood also wavers a little, as with any listener. When a note begins in another field that holds him a quarter more than the field he is listening to, he switches there. But he only does so once he has heard at least one note of the current field in full. Sometimes he sinks into the field he has switched to: then he stays for half a minute to a minute and a half, gets used to it more slowly, and only a big surprise can lure him away. Clicking into a window makes him prick up his ears in its field.
The weight itself fades, and how fast is up to chance. If JCself plays elsewhere, half of it is still there after 17 minutes. If JCself plays where it lies, it wears away, and half of it is often gone much sooner. After 15 hours at the latest, nothing of it remains in the calculation. Yet only seconds after a touch JCself plays different notes than it would have without it, and it never finds its way back to the old path. Every note that sounds afterwards, even in the distant future, belongs to a piece that would not exist without that person. So everyone who was here stays in the piece: a kind of immortality. If you like, add your name; JCself Strom notes the date and time itself: