Score for Pop #
Mill Mission #
pop is the research home for music that comes out of Aesthetic Computer — songs, instrumentals, and the writing about them. The papers platter pushes AC's thinking out as text. pop does the same job in the form of tracks: short, finished pieces of music that can leave the building and be heard.
The mill is not a label. It is a research lane. Every track here exists because it was the most honest way to compress an idea — a feature, a vision, a paper, a moment in the project. If a thread can survive being written as a song, it was real. If it can survive being compressed to ninety seconds, it was essential.
What This Is #
Pop tracks are one output of the AC research platter. They share source material with papers/ — the same threads, the same readings, the same code — but render as audio. The platter feeds both. Some threads become papers, some become tracks, some become both.
Attribution #
AC pop tracks — and the essays written about them — are work of @jeffrey / aesthetic.computer. The DistroKid artist is Aesthetic Dot Computer; the byline on any pop-track essay is @jeffrey (matching papers/cli.mjs, which sets AUTHOR_NAME = "@jeffrey"). Do not byline AC pop tracks or AC papers as "Studio Zollo" — that studio name belongs only to @jeffrey's separate personal-art / non-AC attributions, never to AC work.
Posture #
bottom-up + compositional. tracks here are composed from AC's own instruments — the notepat sample bank, sinebells, chord, beat — the same primitives the recap waltz bed already uses. no suno-style end-to-end song generation; that's product-in, top-down, and not compositional. AI vocal (ElevenLabs) is the one exception, since vocal is performance on top of the composition, not the compositional substrate.
Process #
platter (raw material: notes, code, conversations, papers)
→ thread (a vision worth singing)
→ draft lyrics (in jeffrey-pvc voice + per-genre voice)
→ vocal + beat (per-lane pipeline)
→ mix (~1:30 mp3, audio-only)
Audio-only by default. No video, no chrome. If a track later becomes a video lane, that's a recap-side concern, not a pop concern.
Shipped + in-flight singles (DistroKid status, masters, covers, videos) are tracked in RELEASES.md.
Media files (final mixes, beds, raw billable vocal stems) are not in git — code is the source of truth, media is backed up to the assets system per-track. See ASSETS.md.
Swimlanes #
1. big pictures (big-pictures/) #
Hip hop / trap dance versions of jeffrey's AC visions. Roughly 1:30 per track. Lyrics rapped over a 4/4 trap bed (808s, triplet hats), one track per "big picture" — a single AC vision pulled from the papers platter (laptop orchestras, kidlisp, native OS, identity, latency, etc).
Voice posture: emo-rap honesty. Conviction quiet but absolute. No flexing, no industry posture. Internal rhyme over end rhyme. The vision is the hook.
See big-pictures/README.md for the format spec.
2. voice (voice/) #
The jeffrey harness for Pink Trombone — a tiny, runnable, anatomically grounded jeffrey voice fitted to jeffrey-pvc on a minimal phoneme corpus, with PT parameter bounds derived from the jeffrey-platter photographs. Research lane, not a track lane: the deliverable is a C/WASM-runnable synth + a paper, not an mp3.
See voice/README.md for the pipeline. Status: scaffolded 2026-05-04.
3. dance (dance/) #
Audio-only dance tracks built bottom-up from AC instruments. One AC vision per track, compressed to a 4-bar melodic theme over a four-on-the-floor bed — not a rap hook. Roughly 1:30 per track.
Opens on trance as the first sub-format (138 BPM, minor key, supersaw lead, sidechained pad + bass). The lane lives or dies on the breakdown → build → drop arc, not vibe.
Voice posture: jeffrey-pvc as one-shot hook phrase in the drop + spoken word in the breakdown. Not rapped, not fully sung. Instrumental tracks are also valid.
Prerequisite: a supersaw voice (5–7 detuned saws in unison) doesn't exist in AC yet and is the gating instrument for this lane.
See dance/README.md for the format spec and dance/STUDY.md for the genre study + arrangement law.
4. chillwave (chillwave/) #
Audio-only chillwave / ambient tracks built bottom-up from AC instruments. One AC vision (or mood) per track, slow + spacious, compressed to a melody-over-noise-bed rather than a hook or theme. Roughly 1:30–3:00 per track — longer than the other lanes because the form lives on slow swell.
Voice posture: instrumental by default. jeffrey-pvc as whispered fragments only when present — never sung, never rapped. Reverb-soaked spoken word.
Bed: pink-noise ocean (LFO LP, ~8s wave period) + slow white-noise filter sweeps (~22s cycle, opens fully on the swell) + sparse descending sine-blip bubbles + sinepower pad chord + sinebells melody from the score.
See chillwave/README.md for the format spec.
5. jungle (jungle/) #
Audio-only sunlit jungle built bottom-up from AC instruments — chopped breakbeats, deep dub sub, reggae skank, dub sirens. ~165 BPM, felt half-time. These are beats for fía to rap over: the lane ships the instrumental, fía is the live MC toasting in spanish on top. Her voice is a real human performance — not jeffrey-pvc, not AI — so it sits fully inside the bottom-up posture with no exception needed.
Opens on sunbreak (golden / daytime, not dark-club) with three
variants: jungleton (jungletón — dembow tresillo woven in), raggasol
(classic ragga jungle), rodando (liquid rollers).
The hybrid break (decided @jeffrey, 2026-05-16). Jungle is
classically built on a sample — the Amen break. That collides with the
no-top-down-sampling posture. The lane's resolution is a hybrid: the
groove is the AC percussion kit (percussion.mjs) chopped into
Amen-style syncopation, plus a synthesized bitcrush/flange snare-roll
break-stab at phrase ends as the genre nod. No Winstons sample, no loop.
Not an exception to the posture — its honest answer. Whether AC-played
jungle can carry the form is the research question this lane exists to
test.
See jungle/README.md for the format spec.
6. hippyhayzard (hippyhayzard/) #
Audio-only happy hardcore × nightcore that the form lets turn into an earthbound/mother sorrow-ballad — the name is the spec: hippy (bright major euphoria) colliding with hazard (a minor rave-siren switch). ~152 BPM, half-time ballad feel, a 16-bar hand-voiced Bach chorale (borrowed iv, deceptive cadence), 1:28 with a drop-out break.
Three new bottom-up voices were built for it (same module shape as the dance synths, pure-float for an eventual ac-native C port): skrill (Skrillex FM + swept-formant talking bass — dance/synths/), hoover (Alpha-Juno "Mentasm" with the pitch whoop), zitar (sitar = Karplus-Strong + jawari buzz + sympathetic-string bank).
Voice posture: jeffrey-pvc as a sung lead (not rapped, not one-shot) — the lyric is the vision, tender and plain. bin/sing.mjs is the ballad-tuned vocal pipeline (say → align → WORLD pitch → stretch → intimate mix onto the bed).
See hippyhayzard/README.md for the format spec and hippyhayzard/STUDY.md for the genre study + the blend law. Status: scaffolded 2026-05-19; first sung 1:28 cut rendered, vocal↔section bar-lock is the open refinement.
7. hellsine (hellsine/) #
A concept track under one strict constraint: every voice is a sine wave — no noise, no saw, no square, no samples. The thesis: a distorted sine is the gabber kick, so "all-sine + hardcore" is hardcore's literal DNA. The track carries a full John Williams melodic structure (a hand-written heroic leitmotif, stated → developed → transposed → triumphantly restated) and is built to work as epic study music: continuous, immersive, no dead air under a film arc. ~1:45, 182 BPM, D minor with a climax key-lift. The strictest possible reading of the bottom-up posture — one waveform, a whole genre, a whole compositional tradition.
Voice posture: instrumental. The "voices" are additive-sine brass / strings, sine-FM stabs, a saturated-sine hoover, and the saturated-sine kick. No vocal.
See hellsine/README.md for the all-sine law +
the voice table + the form. Status: scaffolded 2026-05-19.
8. booch (booch/) #
Audio-only fermented hip-hop: a golden-era boom-bap foundation (Queen Latifah / Pete Rock — ~94 BPM, swung 16ths, fat boom kick, bap snare, jazz Rhodes loop, vinyl crackle) cultured with Timbaland future-funk on top (sparse tabla/tumbi accents, hard-gated rests, ad-lib silence). The name is the form: booch = kombucha = slow-fermented mother culture — the lane studies that metaphor literally. The two sub-styles aren't averaged; the track switches between them on purpose (verse 1 full Latifah pocket, verse 2 sparse Timbaland pocket). The ferment is the swing.
Voice posture: jeffrey-pvc as rapped lead (not sung, not one-shot) — narrow pitch range, tight to the 16th-note grid, Latifah-confident on the hook, Missy-playful on verse 2. Mirrors the big-pictures/ TTS-on-bottom-up-composition posture but at boom-bap tempo, not trap.
See booch/README.md for the format spec and booch/STUDY.md for the genre study + the blend law. Status: scaffolded 2026-05-24; first track visualize-my-booch lyrics + .np score drafted, render/sing pipeline pending.
9. novelizer (novelizer/) #
The novel-voice research lane (research lane like voice/ and dsp/, not a track lane). Its project: research synthesis techniques the AC stable doesn't have — scanned synthesis, pulsar trains, feedback-FM chaos, banded-waveguide friction, VOSIM, two-mass creature voices — and prove each as a portable C99 voice (libm only, AC house style) rendered against a fixed battery of test melodies, then scored for novelty / musicality / entertainability. Keepers graduate into track lanes, dance/synths/-style JS ports, gm_synth, or AC Native.
See novelizer/README.md for the harness contract and batch workflow, novelizer/REPORT.md for verdicts. Status: batch 1 landed 2026-07-02 — six voices (scanner, pulsar, frictus, twomass, chaosfm, vosim), all judged keepers.
10. (open) #
More lanes will land here as they prove themselves. Candidates: kidlisp-as-instrument tracks, AC-native ensemble cuts, voice-memo-grade demo lane. None of them have earned a swimlane yet — they need a real track first.
Sample sources (commercial-safe) #
Tracks ship to DistroKid/Spotify, so any sourced audio MUST be CC0 / public-domain or project-owned. Approved sources:
- Freesound API — approved source; filter
license:"Creative Commons 0"(CC0) only. Credentials are NOT committed — they live in the private vault:aesthetic-computer-vault/freesound/credentials.json(Aesthetic Computer account;api_key= search/preview token,client_id/secret = OAuth2 for full-quality downloads). - archive.org — CC0 /
publicdomain/zeroitems only (verify each item'slicenseurl; "license: none" ≠ public domain). - Project-owned — the AC zoo bank (
fedac/native/samples/zoo/) and any AC field recordings.
Per-track sourced SFX are logged with provenance + license in that
track's gitignored out/ dir (e.g. pop/dance/out/.sfx-credits.txt —
trancepenta uses CC0 archive.org horse gallop + neigh).
References #
Third-party lyrics (emo rap reference corpus, etc) live in the vault. They are not committed to this repo. See references/README.md.
maintained by @jeffrey