Introduction

Conchordal is a research-composer scripting surface. The central idea is not note scheduling. The central idea is shaping a perceptual consonance field, then letting populations of voices move, survive, and reorganize inside it.

A scenario script defines Materials (voice templates), places them into the field as Participants, and shapes the terrain they live on. Harmony emerges from psychoacoustics (roughness and harmonicity); rhythm emerges from coupled oscillators on a shared meter the population itself drives. The script is a director, not a sequencer.

Conchordal v0.4.0 is aimed at research composers who want to work with these concepts directly. It is not trying to hide the model behind common music-production vocabulary.

How this book is organized

• Tutorial gets a first sound out and your editor wired up: Quick Start, Editor Setup.
• Concepts explains the three pillars of the model: the Consonance Field, Rhythm, and Routing and the Listener Twin.
• Reference is the complete, generated API Reference — it is produced from the engine’s registered scripting surface, so it cannot drift — and the Curated Samples listening path. The reference is split into three tiers: the Core API (enough for every curated sample), Mechanism Tuning, and Research Controls. Start with Core and ignore the rest until a piece demands it.

Every rhai code block in this book is executed against the real script engine by the test suite, so the examples are guaranteed to run.