Introduction

日本語版

Conchordal is a bio-acoustic instrument for generative composition. Rhai is its scenario language: it directs the instrument without reducing it to 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 PopulationSpecs, places each one into the field as a stable Population, and shapes the terrain its Voices inhabit. Together those Populations form the runtime Community. Harmony emerges from psychoacoustics (roughness and harmonicity); rhythm emerges from coupled oscillators on a shared meter the Community itself drives. The script is a director, not a sequencer.

Conchordal v0.4.0 is a research alpha for researchers and developers who want to examine these concepts directly. Features are incomplete and may be unstable; composers and creators should wait for the beta release. The model is intentionally described in its own terms rather than hidden behind common music-production vocabulary.

How this book is organized

• Tutorial gets a first sound out, wires up your editor, and covers running, recording analysis, and replaying a performance: Quick Start, Editor Setup, and Performance.
• Concepts builds the model from a single living voice to the complete ecological and temporal structure: Population — A Persistent Unit of Voices, Voice and Landscape — Sound–Environment Feedback, Consonance Field — A Terrain for Evaluating Pitch, Rhythm, and Routing and the Listener Twin, followed by Timeline and Structure.
• Reference contains the generated API Reference and the Curated Samples listening path. The reference is split into four tiers: the Core API (enough for every curated sample), Experimental (candidate Core verbs under audition), Mechanism Tuning, and Research Controls. Start with Core and ignore the rest until a piece demands it. Registered signatures and tier membership are generated and checked against the engine; explanatory prose is maintained in the documentation registry.

Every rhai code block in this book is executed against the real script engine by the test suite. This checks that the examples compile and run with the current engine; it does not by itself prove that every explanation is semantically correct.