WhyGbloinkIsInteresting

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Music created with Gbloink has several high level structural characteristics that are also found in music. None of these are explicitly programmed. All emerge from the interactions of the balls within the environment.

Cycles : Typically the balls can fall into cycles, which musically give rise to loops and identifiable rhythms.
Ping Pong : Sometimes, a ball can follow a path in one direction, then bounce back along it in reverse. This means the playing of melody lines forwards and backwards, similar to Bach's experiments with CrabCanon.
Chasing : One ball can fall behind another so both trace the same path in quick succession giving rise to cannon or fugue.
Sometimes the ball can follow a path, wander elsewhere, and later revisit it giving rise to a repeated motif.

These effects can also be combined.

Often a loop includes a ping-pong.
Or two balls will fall into cycles which then phase against each other.
More infrequently, two balls fall into a locked cycle, which involves a periodic collision between the two of them.
Such locked cycles can be switched cycles. Here, each ball is in a cycle of it's own, but after several cycles, they collide, switch into alternative cycles, and after further time, collide again switching back to the first pair of cycles. This is very infrequent.