EventFieldAudio

Memory Decay

a loop remembering itself badly
gen 0
pass 0 · 0:00

Source

drop an audio loop here

wav · mp3 · flac · ogg · m4a

decoded on this device · never uploaded

using: synthesised demo loop

4.00
0.00

The loop is remembered as fragments. Each generation misremembers them a little further.

Decay character

1.00
.35
.30
.40
.30
.30
.25
.45

Presence culls fragments. Harmonic pulls surviving pitches toward just intervals — decay finding its own consonance. Tape erodes the medium itself.

Output

.35
.75
3.0s
4

Hold = loop passes before auto‑decay advances a generation. Fade = how long the sound takes to leave when you stop it, up to a minute. Press x to cut a long fade short.

generation0
surviving16/16
mean drift
bandwidth18.0k
noise floor−∞
lineageroot
fragment memory · one loop
↑ loudness  → time  colour = pitch

Reading this screen

Your loop is chopped into numbered fragments. Each new generation is copied from the last one and remembers it slightly wrong — so the damage accumulates instead of resetting. Press play, then auto‑decay, and leave it running.

Upper panel — one pass of the loop, left to right. Each bar is a fragment: height is how loud it still is, width is how long, position is where in the loop it now falls. Notches along the floor mark where it started out.

Colour — amber means the fragment has drifted sharp, blue‑grey means flat. Dashed outlines on the floor are fragments the system has forgotten; they occasionally come back as ghosts.

Lower strip — the whole history so far. Amber = total drift from the original, dotted = fragments still surviving, brown = remaining bandwidth as the tape closes up.

Right column — the family tree of generations. Click any dot to hear that version, branch to fork a different decay from it, freeze to stop one decaying. Press ? guide for the full explanation.

Lineage 1 node

intact drifting rotted frozen

Archive

A lineage render plays every ancestor in order, once each — the whole history of the damage as one file.

Keys

space play / fade out   x cut
a advance   b branch   f freeze   r origin
↑↓ lineage   ←→ siblings   ? guide

Memory Decay

EventFieldAudio · what this instrument does

It plays a loop over and over, and each time round it remembers the loop a little less accurately. The important part: every version is copied from the previous damaged version, never from the original. Errors inherit. After fifty generations you are listening to a copy of a copy of a copy, and the music has a history rather than a random shuffle.

The lineage of Basinski's Disintegration Loops: a tape looped until the tape itself wore through, the decay becoming the composition.

1 · Give it something to lose

Drop an audio file onto the window — a few seconds of anything. It starts on a synthesised demo loop so you can hear the process straight away. Loop len and start choose which slice of the file becomes the loop. Fragments is how many pieces the loop is remembered in: fewer means coarse, blocky decay, more means fine erosion.

2 · Choose how it forgets

Each slider is a rate of decay per generation, not an amount of randomness:

Entropy scales all of them at once. At zero, memory is perfect and nothing changes — useful for hearing the untouched loop.

3 · Let it run

Play starts the loop. Auto‑decay advances a generation every few passes (hold sets how many). Advance steps one generation by hand. Long sessions are the point — the interesting material is thirty, eighty, two hundred generations in.

4 · The family tree

Every generation is kept. The tree on the right grows downward, dot colour and size showing how far each one has fallen from the original.

5 · Keep the result

Render to wav writes a file. Lineage path plays every ancestor in order, once each — the entire history of the damage as one continuous piece. Current gen writes just the version you are hearing.

Fade

Stopping never cuts. The fade control sets how long the sound takes to leave, up to a full minute, on a gentle curve — long fades are part of the material.

Requirements

A current desktop version of Chrome, Safari, Edge or Firefox. Audio is decoded and processed entirely on your own device and is never uploaded. It runs on phones and tablets, but scheduling this many overlapping voices is demanding — long sessions will drain a battery, and it is really meant for a desktop and a decent pair of speakers.

Memory Decay v0.1.0-beta.1 · EventFieldAudio · © James Richmond 2026