Melodies become real. Your listening gives them weight.
Listen – just listening changes the piece. The longer you stay, the more weight you give to the notes that are sounding. When you leave, JCself grows bored and looks for new paths.
Give your name to the stream. Each letter touches a spot in all three fields, and everyone hears your name at once. If you like, it then stays under “Traces” with the date and time.
Click into a landscape. The notes there gain weight, and the field wins voices. Everyone listening hears it at once.
Soft sine plays pure sine tones, freely, exactly as JCself computes them: in a hundred steps per octave, without a tuning system, between the semitones too.
Crescionda plays the notes freely, exactly as JCself computes them. The landscape from which JCself chooses its notes becomes the timbre itself: the distance between its two highest peaks sets the frequency at which each note is modulated, the height of all peaks how strongly – the higher the peaks, the richer the sound. So the same shape appears on the large scale, in the course of the whole piece, and on the small scale, inside every single note: self-similarity.
Gong: JCself computes its notes freely, in a hundred steps per octave, without a tuning system. Each note is played by the recording from Peter Heeren’s gong bank whose main tone lies closest to the computed note – as it is, never transposed, ringing out fully. Here the gong itself is the tuning system.
Click one of the three landscapes to give weight to the notes there. Everyone hears it.
Many voices: the sound may stutter on weaker devices.
Together: all three fields sound – Soft sine on the left, Crescionda in the middle, the gong on the right.
Every change applies to everyone listening.
Whoever touches a landscape changes the stream – for everyone listening now, and for everything that comes after. The weight fades away, the trace remains.
JCself Strom keeps playing without pause, since 1 November 2026 and without end. Strom is German for both stream and electric current: it plays as long as there is power. Melodies find their way: every voice follows a line in small steps, and the landscape has its say. Everything that happens here changes the probabilities with which JCself chooses the next notes. Even listening does: the longer someone stays, the more weight their attention gives to the notes that are sounding. Leaving does too: whoever leaves shows JCself boredom, and the stream looks for new paths. And whoever touches a landscape or gives their name gives weight to the notes there.
Three fields play at once: A Soft sine, B Crescionda and C Gong – each its own JCself with its own landscape and its own swarm of voices. Listen to all three together, or zapped: then a listener chooses where to listen – wherever he is surprised, until he grows used to it.
How A, B and C influence each other: They listen to one another. Every note a field plays leaves a trace in the other two landscapes, half as strong as in its own field. It lies on the same note, moved into the octave in which the other field is playing. When the gong plays a note, that note becomes more likely for Soft sine and Crescionda too. So the three find their way to related notes, yet each stays in its own register. At the same time they compete for your favour: whoever you listen to and touch gets voices from the others, at most one every 20 seconds. Each keeps at least half of its swarm. Listening to all three together gives favour to all three. Listening zapped gives it to the field where the listener is, and the listener himself adds favour to it too. A touch makes him prick up his ears as well. When attention fades, the favour fades, and the voices wander back.
How the listener zaps: He always listens to one field only, the same for everyone. A field catches his attention when it surprises him: with a big leap, with a note that has much more or much less weight or sounds much longer or shorter than the notes before, and most of all with a peak of its landscape. The surprise fades within a few seconds. A field with many voices does not hold him just by their number. The longer he listens to a field, the more he gets used to it, clearly so after about ten seconds. A surprising note there refreshes him, and what he has not heard for a while becomes new to him again. His mood also wavers a little, as with any listener. When a note begins in another field that holds him a quarter more than the field he is listening to, he switches there. But he only does so once he has heard at least one note of the current field in full. Touching a field makes him prick up his ears there.
The weight itself fades, and how fast is up to chance. If JCself plays elsewhere, half of it is still there after 17 minutes. If JCself plays where it lies, it wears away, and half of it is often gone much sooner. After 15 hours at the latest, nothing of it remains in the calculation. Yet only seconds after a touch JCself plays different notes than it would have without it, and it never finds its way back to the old path. Every note that sounds afterwards, even in the distant future, belongs to a piece that would not exist without that person. So everyone who was here stays in the piece: a kind of immortality. If you like, add your name; JCself Strom notes the date and time itself: