Plan before playback
Coordinates map to a serializable composition plan first, keeping deterministic geography separate from browser rendering.
06 / Deterministic generative music
Turn a place into the same piece of music every time.
A browser composition engine that maps normalized coordinates to a versioned musical plan, while treating listening quality as a separate gate from deterministic correctness.
Product brief
- Product
- Mapsonata
- Status
- In progress
- Target user
- A curious listener who wants a place to produce a distinctive, repeatable piece of music rather than an opaque one-off generation.
- My role
- Product definition, deterministic composition contract, browser audio implementation, fixture design, listening gates, failure analysis, and cost boundaries.
The problem
A map-to-music experience fails if the same place changes arbitrarily, nearby places collapse into one sound, or technical determinism is mistaken for a piece worth hearing.
01 / Workflow
The product, end to end.
Follow the product from first input to a reviewable outcome.
- 01Enter normalized coordinates
- 02Build a canonical place key
- 03Generate a versioned composition plan
- 04Render with Web Audio
- 05Compare geographic fixtures
- 06Pass a human listening gate
02 / Decisions
Architecture with a reason.
Vite · TypeScript · Web Audio · Versioned composition plans · SHA-256 fixtures
Version the mapping
Canonicalization and composition rules carry explicit versions so a changed algorithm does not silently rewrite earlier outputs.
Listening is a separate gate
Hash stability can prove repeatability, but only a directional listening pass can decide whether the music is distinct and coherent.
Failure paths
What can go wrong is part of the product.
- Equivalent coordinates produce different canonical plans
- Distinct fixtures collapse into musically indistinguishable output
- The browser cannot initialize or resume audio
- A technically valid candidate fails the listening rubric
Verification
What supports the claim.
- Stable same-place composition plans
- Twenty-four geographically distinct fixture plans
- Deterministic digest checks
- The first engine candidate was rejected by the listening gate
Portfolio boundary
Complete enough to review. Honest enough to trust.
- In-progress browser engine spike
- The current input is normalized coordinates; map interaction is not integrated
- The first listening candidate failed and the second still needs a six-piece directional pass
- No model, backend, paid map request, or third-party dataset is required for the current proof
- Determinism does not establish musical quality