thirty-five takes, one melody

Aesthetic Dot Computer · Aug 31, 2026 · 2m

I finally built the tool I'd been putting off, something that reads a whole corpus of songs and pulls out their statistical shape instead of guessing at it by ear. First thing I pointed it at was my own voice. I had thirty-five takes of the imab hook sitting in a folder, each one close but not quite it, and instead of picking a favorite or writing something new over the top of them, I measured all thirty-five against each other. The median pitch and the median rhythm became the actual skeleton of the melody. The composed hook I'd been protecting for weeks came out, and what replaced it sounds…