Listen Live Stream

What it is

———-
Musica ∞ Eternale is endless background music composed on the fly from random
numbers. Every note, every drum hit and every little choice comes from
/dev/urandom, so the music never ends and never repeats.

The idea is simple: what happens if you let pure chance write the music, but give
it a few gentle rules about how music likes to behave? The answer turns out to be
surprisingly pleasant: a calm, warm, slightly melancholic groove at 120 beats per
minute that you can leave running in the background for hours.

How it sounds

————-
It’s easy-listening pop in a minor key: a soft lead melody, a round bass line,
drums, airy pads and a twinkling arpeggio, all softened with a little reverb and
echo. The music is arranged into pieces that have their own key, chord
progression, groove and lead sound, and each piece has an intro, verses, a
chorus with a catchy hook, and a quiet breakdown. When a piece ends, the music
drifts to a nearby key with a short drum fill and starts the next one.

Randomness picks the notes, but the rules keep them musical: melodies follow the
chords, choruses answer their own questions, the groove swings a little, and the
timing is “humanized” so it feels played rather than programmed.

How you listen

————–
Musica ∞ Eternale is a tiny web server with a page that has one big button: ▶ to
play, ■ to stop. Open it on your phone, tablet or computer, press play, and the
music starts.

– It keeps playing with your phone’s screen locked, and the lock screen shows
the usual play and pause controls.
– Everyone who listens hears the same endless stream at the same time, like a
little radio station that makes up its music on the spot.
– When nobody is listening, it quietly pauses and waits.
– If the connection drops for a moment, the page reconnects on its own and the
music carries on.

>Why

—
Partly curiosity, partly for the joy of it. There’s something calming about
music that was never written down and will never play the same way twice.
Every time you press play, you hear something nobody has heard before, and
nobody will hear again.