RESERVOIR: Echo State Composer

RESERVOIR is a platform for exploring new (and old) musical pattern — a way of thinking about notes and their mathematical relationships as producing and erasing culture.

Algorithmic composition has a deep history that is part of a continuum of highly inventive and instructive thinking about what music making and "composing" might be. Before the 1960s, when minimalism and pop took over, there was a computational optimism that by pulling apart cultural inheritance and unquestioned norms would allow for a remaking of what's possible.

Serialism and its many branchings was only one early part of this conversation — and not the origins even. Just adjacent was Joseph Schillinger, a Russian theorist whose student Lawrence Berk founded Schillinger House — which became Berklee — and whose students and inheritors were aesthetically diverse, from Gershwin and Gil Evans to Earle Brown. Schillinger's foundational idea was interference of periodicities: the principle that complex musical time emerges from the interaction of overlapping temporal cycles, not from any single pattern in isolation. He treated rhythm as the primary organizing principle of all music, preceding harmony and melody.

Schillinger was not committed to atonality; he was committed to bridging mathematics, nature, and the arts in a kind of early-20th-century mystic way. Others followed with their own approaches — Xenakis among them — and when computers became available in academic settings, "computer music" became a field of research unto itself, with implementations of abstract mathematics, neural networks, and now transformers and diffusion models that will simply "solve for music" based on training data.

RESERVOIR is a resource for exploring the pattern logic of music making, not a solver — a reservoir, not an answer. A reservoir accumulates. It holds material whose origins are diverse and whose interactions are ongoing. What comes out is shaped by everything that has entered and by the dynamics of the holding itself.

RESERVOIR brings this lineage into a real-time DAW-integrated pattern engine — not to compose for you but as a vast tunable landscape. A polyphonic texture orchestrator that generates, perforates, and shapes 12 simultaneous voices of MIDI through a pipeline of mathematically grounded algorithms, each rooted in a specific tradition — and enhanced by a machine learning layer: an Echo State Network whose recurrent neurons hold decaying echoes of the system's own output, producing new patterns through the same kind of temporal interference that Schillinger formalized ninety years ago. It listens to itself and evolves continuously. It's not a step sequencer, though you can make sequences. Not a random note generator, though you can generate quasi-random microtimed clouds. It is a system whose internal logic draws on a century of thinking about how to organize time and pitch with rigor and surprise simultaneously. Future updates will add more logics, but as it stands there are more than 100,000 unique scenarios from which to find material or create textures or new frameworks for whole pieces.

The output is standard MIDI, very particularly timed, capable of microtonality. Route it to any instrument. Record it, edit it, build on it.

What RESERVOIR produces is not raw material. It is patterned material — patterns drawn from traditions and mathematical logics that precede and exceed any individual's claim to authorship. Composition has always been a negotiation with inherited structures. RESERVOIR makes this negotiation explicit, navigable, and productive.