Mombobasleep — our first 10-minute extended sleep mix, a remix of pop/marimba/marimbaba. The calm nocturne twin of the lullaby, the way pop/sleephellsine is the calm twin of pop/hellsine.

The difference: sleephellsine abandoned hellsine's instruments for pure sine. Mombobasleep keeps the actual marimba synth (../marimba/synths/marimba.mjs) — that's what makes it a marimbaba remix and not a sleephellsine clone. "Mom" = the lullaby rocked dozy, dumb-happy, and very, very slow.

The formula #

marimbaba's 80-second lullaby is dissolved into a slow, generative 10-minute drift. There is no fixed arrangement — every render is built from the same parts on a deterministic random walk (seeded, so re-renders are bit-identical):

Harmony stays home in marimbaba's F-major world — its four diatonic chords F / Dm / Bb / C — wandering between them every ~16–22 s. C wants to resolve home to F; the weighted walk keeps it gently circling, never landing hard enough to wake you. Voice-led by the pad's long ring.
Melody drops marimbaba's own phrase cells (hush / twinkle / wow / ba-ba / sleep) sparsely over the chords. Bright cells (twinkle, way-up, wow) are sipped early and fade out; the descending sighs (hush, sleep) take over. The singer sinks an octave in the back third and the gaps between phrases widen — the piece itself falls asleep.
Four marimba voices, all rung out to long decays (decayMul 1.3–2.6): bass (the rocking chair, deep + soft), vibraphone_off (the dream-haze pad, held thirds, 14 ms haas-widened), rosewood (the singer), kalimba (twinkles on phrase tails).
A felted 5-voice drone bed underneath (stereo chorus + a fixed-filter sub) — every layer is pitched and musical: no field recordings, no noise beds, no filter sweeps, no texture layers. The old rain sample + brownian/air hiss went first (too repetitive, too noisy for sleep); the phaser sweep, the sub's LFO-swept "wub", and the felting noise-fizz followed (2026-06-11). Movement comes only from the chorus and each drone voice's own woozy vibrato/drift.

Audio target #

Length: 10:00 final master (engine renders 10:10 and truncates to 600 s).
Master: gentle sleep chain — highpass 22 Hz, +3 dB low shelf @ 85 Hz, −3.5 dB shelf above 3.2 kHz, one soft 2:1 glue compressor (no leveller), a measured LINEAR gain to −16 LUFS / −1 dBTP, with a 2 s fade-in and 5 s fade-out guarding the loop seam — nothing ever cuts abruptly.

Files #

bin/render-momabobasheep.mjs — the generative renderer + inline sleep master. Reuses mixEventMarimba from the marimba lane.
bin/gen-illy.mjs — cover generator. A felted naptime: one needle-felted wool doll of jeffrey alone, asleep in a nest of felt bedding, his little felt laptop dozing beside him.
momabobasheep.illy.txt — cover prompt (lowercase fragments, papers voice).
out/momabobasheep.struct.json — the chord walk (for any future visualizer).

Run #

# render + sleep-master in one go → out/momabobasheep.mp3
node pop/momboba/bin/render-momabobasheep.mjs

# write the master elsewhere
node pop/momboba/bin/render-momabobasheep.mjs --out ~/momabobasheep.mp3

# a different overnight — same parts, new random walk
node pop/momboba/bin/render-momabobasheep.mjs --seed nightfall

# cover (cached unless --force); embeds into out/momabobasheep.mp3
node pop/momboba/bin/gen-illy.mjs
node pop/momboba/bin/gen-illy.mjs --force
node pop/momboba/bin/gen-illy.mjs --embed-only

# scorodeon — watch the score fly by a fixed center line (vertical, story-ready)
node pop/momboba/bin/scorodeon-data.mjs   # events.json → scorodeon.json
node pop/bin/scorodeon.mjs pop/momboba/out/momabobasheep.scorodeon.json \
  pop/momboba/out/momabobasheep.mp3 --desktop          # --size WxH --zoom sec

Listen with QuickTime, not Apple Music: open -a "QuickTime Player" pop/momboba/out/momabobasheep.mp3