Language for the discipline

Spatial composition needs vocabulary. These terms stay grounded in what the platform can show, play, and share, so the language stays usable rather than purely theoretical. Every term has a stable anchor; deep-link to any definition with /learn/glossary#term-slug.

The cross-reference layer for the rest of the knowledgebase. Six categories: discipline-level terms, the objects, the behaviors that shape procedural music, the visual encoding language, named compositional techniques, and the artifacts you produce when you publish. Each term is anchored: link to /learn/glossary#composer-agent (or any other term slug) from anywhere.

Discipline terms

The terminology that names the field itself.

Spatial composition

Composing music by arranging musical objects, routes, timing, and transformations in a playable network. The umbrella term for the discipline this knowledgebase exists to define. Spatial composition is the short, sticky name; procedural spatial composition is the technical flavor of the discipline that this platform implements.

Procedural spatial composition

The technical flavor of spatial composition implemented by Vibe Together. Procedural agents inside Sources generate material; the topology decides where, when, and how it travels. Agents need a graph to live in, and a graph without signals is a very handsome diagram.

Network topology

The shape of a spatial composition: which objects exist, how they are connected, what the routes can do. In spatial composition the topology is the score: change the topology and you change the music. Topology is the noun students of the discipline learn to read first.

Generation limit

Every signal tracks the route it has traveled. One-way phrases can continue through the graph, but repeated feedback routes stop after sixteen repeat hops (MAX_SIGNAL_GENERATION = 16). The limit makes cycles musical instead of runaway: a feedback loop produces evolving material for a bounded number of repeats and then fades.

Layout-as-rhythm

The central insight of spatial composition: wire travel time is musical time. Move a node closer to its source and the rhythm tightens; move it further and a delay opens up. The same gesture that arranges the layout composes the rhythm.

Levels of abstraction

Spatial composition lets a creator operate at several levels: tick timing, the layout of nodes and wires, a Source's procedural agent, the modifier chain, and song structure. Different creators can work at different levels in the same shared graph.

White-box AI

The principle that AI help should become visible, inspectable, and editable material. AI Spark stages a graph proposal before the host applies it; Prompt Refine exposes Sound Lab changes; Sing to Nodes produces editable notes. The player still owns taste.

Expanded pitch vocabulary

The long-term effort to move beyond Western 12-note defaults where the music calls for it: non-Western scales, microtonal pitch spaces, custom tuning maps, and cultural systems studied with care rather than flattened into presets.

Object terms

The five building blocks, their variants, and the things that flow between them.

Source

The object that creates signals. It carries an instrument, a procedural preset, an output mode, and a trigger. The shared protocol still calls it an emitter; player-facing language uses Source.

Wire

A route plus a delay. Three timing modes (distance, beats, milliseconds) determine how grid layout maps to musical time. Wires are not passive connections; they are active timing devices that you compose with.

Node

A destination where a signal becomes sound. Vibe Nodes play one resolved pitch, Chord Nodes play a voicing, and Sample Nodes play an audio clip. A muted node still receives the signal and shows its arrival.

Vibe node

Single-note destination. Receives a signal, resolves it into a note, schedules audio playback. Can use generated pitch, override pitch manually, or keep generated pitch while overriding velocity / duration on a per-node basis.

Chord node

Multi-note destination. Procedural mode follows the global chord progression; manual mode locks to a specific scale-degree chord. Voicing style, inversion, octave, strum length, and arpeggiation are all editable.

Sample Node

Audio-clip destination. It can use an upload, microphone recording, generated sample, library item, or built-in effect. Trim, reverse, pitch, fade, tone, loop, gate, and retrigger behavior remain editable inside the graph.

Modifier

A signal-processing object between a Source and a destination. Five shared subtypes exist: Splitter, Gate, Harmony, Modulator, and Sample. The first four transform routing, timing, pitch, or role; Sample turns arrival into clip playback.

Splitter

A routing modifier with four modes: all copies to every wire; roundRobin takes turns; weighted picks one wire proportionally; probability lets each wire make an independent decision.

Gate

A timing modifier that decides whether and when to release an arriving signal. Five modes: delay (hold for N beats), everyNth (release every Nth arrival), Step Mask (pass from a 16-step bar pattern), Song Measures (pass during selected section measures), and boundaryHold (release at the next musical boundary).

Harmony

A pitch modifier with 17 transforms: unison, octave shifts, scale-aware seconds, thirds, fifths and sixths, chord-tone movement, chromatic semitone shifts, and inversion around the last pitch.

Modulator

A personality modifier that swaps the agent role carried by a signal. Pitch and rhythm continue unchanged; the downstream node interprets a different role. One Source can become several voices.

Signal

A scheduled musical event traveling through the graph. Carries the preset reference, the agent state (last scale degree, last octave, contour direction, last MIDI note), the resolved pitch / velocity / duration, and route history used to bound feedback loops.

Behavior terms

The vocabulary of the procedural agent and the parameters that determine how a graph behaves.

Composer agent

The 30-parameter generator inside every Source preset. It decides pitch, contour, harmonic focus, register, dynamics, articulation, swing, anticipation, and resolution behavior. Each customized Source keeps its own snapshot.

Agent role

The high-level personality label on a preset. Six roles ground the preset library: bass (low register, walking patterns), melody (mid register, scale-tone focus), harmony (mid register, voice-leading bias), rhythm (chordal pad, pedal contour), lead (high register, motif/sequence contour), percussion (pitched drums, fixed register).

Contour

The up-and-down shape of a procedurally generated melody. Nine modes: free (random within constraints), ascending, descending, oscillate (alternating direction), gravity (drift toward chord root), motif (repeat a user-defined offset pattern), pedal (repeat one note), wave (smooth direction shifts), sequence (motif transposed up by step).

Harmonic focus

The constraint on which notes the agent will produce. rootFocus, chordTones, and guideTones follow exact borrowed and altered chords. scaleTones, colorTones, and pentatonic retain the parent-scale palette, except when resolution or anticipation deliberately lands on an altered chord tone.

Voicing style

The arrangement of notes inside a chord. Seven styles: close (notes within one octave), drop2 (second voice from top dropped an octave), shell (root / third / seventh only), power (root and fifth), cluster (all notes within an octave, packed), quartal (stacked fourths), rootless (root omitted, bass voice supplies it from elsewhere).

Voice leading

Smooth melodic motion between chord tones across chord changes. The nearestChordTone harmony transform implements one core voice-leading principle: minimize interval motion between consecutive chord tones, including staying on the same pitch when it already belongs to the chord. Strict chordToneAbove and chordToneBelow transforms force upward or downward chord-tone motion instead. (The platform does not enforce parallel-fifth avoidance, leading-tone resolution rules, or full soprano/bass voicing constraints; those remain compositional choices.)

Trigger mode

When a Source fires. Seven modes: measure, chord, phrase, sectionStart, sectionEnd, sectionCycle, and interval.

Timing mode

How a wire delays a signal. Three modes: distance (one grid step = one tick = 125 ms at 120 BPM), beats (lock to a fractional or whole musical beat regardless of layout), milliseconds (exact delay in audio time, independent of tempo).

Reset behavior

When a procedural agent's phrase state restarts. loop restarts and wraps register motion at phrase length, phrase restarts while range-clamping, resetOnChord restarts when the complete chord identity changes, and resetOnBar restarts once per absolute measure.

Tendency tone

A scale degree with a strong harmonic gravity toward another. The leading tone (scale degree 7) wants to resolve to the tonic (1); the fourth wants to resolve to the third. Agent parameters tendencyToneStrength and resolutionUrgency control how readily the agent honors these pulls on strong beats.

Core progression

The global chord progression that procedural chord nodes, harmony transforms, and composer agents read while the graph plays. Steps can alter a root or chord quality for borrowed chords and secondary dominants. Manual mode uses the player-authored sequence; generated mode uses tonal-function probabilities plus optional chromatic dominant pulls.

AI Spark

A host-controlled creative brief that produces a staged, editable graph proposal. The host can review the plan and apply the graph alone or the full set of proposed music, routing, sound, and mix choices.

Vibeling

A reusable Sound Lab synth patch. Design the sound, save it, and assign it to Sources without flattening the composition into audio.

Visual encoding terms

The second language of music in the platform: every event has a visible body.

Pitch hue

Each pitch class is mapped to a hue on a chromatic color wheel. C = 0° (red), C# = 30°, D = 60°, D# = 90°, E = 120°, F = 150°, F# = 180°, G = 210° (cyan), G# = 240°, A = 270° (blue), A# = 300°, B = 330° (violet). Adjacent semitones are 30° apart. Enharmonic equivalents share a hue.

Octave brightness

Same hue, different lightness. Lower octaves render darker, higher octaves render brighter. The HSL lightness ramps from roughly 30% at the bottom of the playable range up to 70% at the top, so the register of the music is also visible.

Duration border

The contextual square border around Vibe and Chord Nodes encodes note length while staying inside one grid cell. Longer notes stack more segments. It appears on hover, selection, and edit, or globally when note parameters are enabled in Look.

Velocity border

The articulation border carries velocity as visual weight. Quiet notes draw more lightly; harder hits look heavier. The arrival flash supplies the transient motion while the border leaves inspectable evidence behind.

Signal pulse

The cyan core riding a glowing halo along a wire as a signal travels. A short trail of fading particles follows behind. The core fades in at the source, brightens through the middle of the journey, and fades out at the destination.

Arrival ripple

The expanding ring on a destination node when it sounds. Tinted with the resolved pitch color, scaled by the velocity, animated as a quick bloom-and-fade. The ripple is the visual confirmation that a signal has just produced sound.

Modifier palette

The role-encoding color scheme for modifiers, distinct from pitch hue. Splitter is orange, gate is cyan, harmony is blue, modulator is pink. Chord nodes are lavender; vibe nodes are light cyan. The palette lets you read the role of every node in a graph at a glance.

Technique terms

Repeatable creator moves. Each has its own article in the Techniques section.

Distance rhythm

Timing created by spatial separation between connected objects. Move a Vibe Node farther from its Source and the delay grows; move it closer and the delay shrinks. Edit the rhythm by editing the layout.

Probabilistic routing

Branch selection based on chance or weights. Produces arrangements that vary over time without anyone sequencing the variation. Weighted mode shuffles between branches; probability mode produces density variation as branches independently fire or skip.

Gate choreography

Rhythm changes built from gate logic instead of event placement. Custom patterns via Step Mask, arrangement windows via Song Measures, regular punctuation via everyNth, and grid snapping via boundaryHold. The same drum pattern can be expressed as gate logic in a few clicks.

Harmonic gravity

Chord nodes as anchors with melodic branches routed through nearestChordTone harmony transforms. When the chord changes, the melody moves to the closest tone of the new chord automatically. Harmonic intent is encoded in the topology, not memorized by the composer.

Modulator chain

One Source feeding parallel branches through different Modulators. The voices share a pulse but diverge in register, contour, and harmonic focus.

Controlled feedback

Using the feedback budget creatively. Cycles produce evolving material until they fade out predictably. Connect a node back to one of its upstream neighbors and design a transformation sequence that decays gracefully across the available repeat hops.

Multi-voice from one Source

Parallel harmony branches at different intervals derived from a single source. Three- or four-voice texture, locked rhythmically because all branches share the source pulse, free harmonically because each branch transforms the pitch independently.

Audio-reactive texture

Visual layer that samples the audio output (FFT energy bands, RMS, spectral centroid, beat onsets, recent-note history) and responds in real time. New territory beyond traditional notation: a score-based composition has no language for "this voice gets louder when the bass is loud."

Selection workspaces

The Compose, Flow, and Route surfaces for multi-selection. Compose shapes notes and articulation, Flow shapes wires and timing, and Route shapes Sources and modifiers. Pitch Lab is the pitch-macro area inside Compose.

Transform chain

A sequence of modifiers that changes signal behavior before sound is produced. A typical chain is Source → Splitter → Harmony → Gate → Vibe Node. Each stage is composable; the chain itself is the move.

Spatial motif

A repeated graph shape that produces a recognizable musical gesture, transposable by being copied to a new location. Once a small subgraph produces a sound you like, duplicate it and it produces a related sound at the new location.

Artifact terms

The shareable outputs of the discipline. Graphs as objects.

Study graph

A small published composition designed to demonstrate one concept. The atomic teaching unit of the curriculum: short enough to read end-to-end, focused enough to make a single point about topology, harmony, or timing.

Remix study

A copy of a published graph that changes one structural idea. The analytical method of spatial composition: critique structure through transformation. A remix study with a one-sentence topology note saying what changed and why is the discipline's equivalent of an essay.

Topology note

A writing practice for a published graph description. In 1–3 sentences, name the Source and preset, the important routes, the transformations doing the work, and the audible result. A topology note helps another person study and remix the structure.

Lineage

The chain of remixes connecting a published graph back to its original. Each remix records its source so the family tree is traceable. Lineage turns the gallery from a flat catalog into a network of derivations: a useful structure for both teachers (tracing influence) and students (finding their own way in).

Snapshot

A saved checkpoint of a graph's state. Allows branches and reverts during composition. Snapshots are private to the composer; only published graphs are visible to others.