Signals: the lifecycle

Every audible event in a spatial composition is one signal travelling through the topology. This article documents the full lifecycle: launch, routing, transformation, arrival, playback. And the hard limit that keeps cycles musical.

A signal is the unit of musical time. It is created, it travels, it transforms, it arrives, it sounds. Understanding the lifecycle is what lets you design feedback loops that produce evolving music instead of runaway noise.

Launch

When a Source's trigger condition is met, the server creates a signal carrying its preset and ComposerAgent state, instrument, output mode, resolved pitch, velocity, duration, and procedural memory. The signal is dispatched onto the Source's outgoing wires.

Routing

Each wire has a travel duration. The signal is held in flight for that duration before arriving at its target. While in flight, the signal is visible: the cyan core travels along the wire and the trail particles fade behind it. If the target is a modifier (splitter, gate, harmony, modulator), the signal may be transformed, duplicated, delayed, or dropped before continuing onward. Splitter branches are instant. Signals leaving a Gate use that output wire's distance, beat, or millisecond timing; set it to 0 beats or 0 ms when you want an explicit instant release.

Feedback generation limit

Each Source wave tracks the nodes and wires reached by all of its branches. Every distinct node and wire is admitted once. After that, the whole wave shares up to MAX_SIGNAL_GENERATION = 16 repeated node arrivals and 16 repeated wire traversals before further repeats are dropped.

Arrival and playback

When a signal arrives at a sound destination (vibe node or chord node), the server resolves the final note payload: pitch, velocity, duration, scheduled time, and broadcasts it as a RichSignalEvent to all clients. Each client schedules the playback locally on the audio thread, with adaptive buffering to absorb network jitter. The visible arrival ripple blooms on the destination node tinted with the resolved pitch color.

How signals are encoded visually as they travel and arrive. Continue learning