Sign in →
CloudLab Works emblem: Waku the orca ringed by CloudLab and WorksCLOUDLAB WORKScrossed whale bones, one end a wrenchCloud City, headwaters of the agentic cloud revolution!

History

Where the lab's practice comes from. Code as Music, the instrument on this site, is a Sonic Pi program driven by the lab's own state; Sonic Pi is a 2013 branch of live coding; live coding is a 2004 name for something that reached a laboratory in 1957 and a monastery a thousand years before that. The line below is that lineage, in order, with the lab's own entries at the end. Dates and names are from the sources at the bottom; the last two rows are ours.

Antiquity

  1. The Anunnaki, in Sumerian and Akkadian texts

    The Anunnaki are the assembly of deities named in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform literature — the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis, temple hymns — real ancient religious cosmology, attested on clay, not reconstructed from silence.

    The "ancient astronaut" version — Anunnaki as extraterrestrials from a planet Nibiru who engineered humans and handed down technology — comes from Zecharia Sitchin's 1976 book The 12th Planet, built on Sumerian and Akkadian translations that every credentialed Assyriologist since has rejected. No cuneiform tablet describes spaceflight or a twelfth planet. It is on this page the way CHANT is below: a named counter-example, not a fact.

    The music side is real and physical: temple hymns to the Anunnaki gods were sung and played, not just recited, and Sumer left instruments to prove it. The Lyres of Ur — recovered from the Royal Cemetery of Ur (c. 2550–2450 BCE) by Leonard Woolley's excavation, one with a bearded bull's head in gold and lapis lazuli — are physical evidence of temple/court music from this period, now split between the British Museum, the Penn Museum and the Iraq Museum. The oldest surviving substantially complete piece of notated music, the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal (Hymn No. 6, cuneiform tablet h.6, c. 14th century BCE, excavated at Ugarit in modern Syria), is a hymn to the goddess Nikkal rather than the Anunnaki by name, but it comes from the same Mesopotamian cuneiform hymn tradition the Anunnaki texts belong to — the practice of writing gods' hymns down with instructions for singing them.

  2. Egyptian temple music

    The sistrum, harp and lyre appear in temple reliefs and papyri across dynastic Egypt; the cult of Hathor used the sistrum's rattle specifically as a ritual instrument. This part is verified by iconography and surviving instruments, not inference.

    "Egyptian Mystery School" as a codified doctrine of vibrational or frequency healing is a later Western construction: Hermetic texts date to Greco-Roman Egypt at the earliest, elaborated much further by Renaissance Hermeticists and then 19th–20th century Theosophy and New Thought writers. No Pharaonic-era Egyptian source describes a mystery-school curriculum built on vibration. Real instrument, retrojected doctrine — the two don't share a source. The retrofit is traced step by step in The vibration line below.

  3. Pythagoras and the monochord ratios

    Whole-number string ratios — 2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the fifth, 4:3 for the fourth — and the idea that the cosmos itself runs on the same proportions, the "harmony of the spheres." The mathematics holds up and still underlies Western tuning. The catch shared with most of what's attributed to Pythagoras: the earliest surviving accounts are Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 100 CE) and Iamblichus (c. 300 CE), five hundred to eight hundred years after the man died. Real math, secondhand biography. What later got built on top of the ratios, and how little of it he would recognise, is in The vibration line.

  4. The Antikythera mechanism

    A geared bronze device that computes astronomical positions, eclipse timing and the four-year Olympiad cycle, built somewhere in the Greek world roughly two thousand years before anything else on this page. Sponge divers recovered it from a Roman-era shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in 1901; it sat catalogued and mostly misunderstood until X-ray and CT imaging by the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project (2005–2006) resolved more than thirty interlocking gears. Routinely called the earliest known analog computer — the first one on record, and the only one on this page pulled out of the ocean.

  5. Solfeggio frequencies

    The 396/417/528/639/741/852 Hz set marketed as a rediscovered ancient scale traces to Dr. Joseph Puleo and Dr. Leonard Horowitz's 1999 book Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse, derived by numerology from a Bible verse (Numbers 7:12–14). There is no documented occurrence of these frequencies, by that name or otherwise, before the late 1990s — not in Egypt, not in Pythagorean theory, not anywhere. It sits here as this page's second CHANT-style counter-example: a marketing claim wearing antiquity's clothes. Whose antiquity, and how it was borrowed, is traced in The vibration line.

The vibration line: Pythagoras to frequency healing

Three entries above are usually sold as one story: Egyptian mystery schools, Pythagorean harmony, and frequencies that heal. They are connected, but not in the direction the story claims. The ratios are real and come first. The Egyptian provenance was attached later, by Greeks and then by Europeans, and was disproved four hundred years ago. The medicine was attached later still. Tracing it in order is the only way to see which link actually carries weight, and this page keeps the chain because the lab's own instrument runs on the half of it that is true.

  1. The ratios, which are real

    Whole-number string ratios on a monochord: 2:1 an octave, 3:2 a fifth, 4:3 a fourth. Divide a string by small integers and the ear hears consonance. This is measurable, reproducible, and still underlies Western tuning today. Everything downstream borrows its authority from this one verified fact. Note the limit of what it says: it describes which pitches sound agreeable together. It says nothing about disease.

  2. Plato hands the ratios to the cosmos

    The Timaeus builds the world-soul out of Pythagorean intervals. This is the hinge where a fact about strings becomes a claim about the universe, and it is a philosophical move, not an empirical one. "Harmony of the spheres" is poetry that kept its Pythagorean credentials long after it stopped being arithmetic.

  3. The Corpus Hermeticum, written in Greek, set in Egypt

    Greco-Roman Egypt produces a body of Greek philosophical texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a fusion of Hermes and Thoth. The Egyptian setting is a frame; the philosophy is Greek, Platonist and of its own era. This is the actual origin of "Egyptian mystery school" as Westerners mean it: not Pharaonic, not a curriculum, and roughly two thousand years after the temple instruments in the Antiquity section above.

  4. Ficino translates it as primeval wisdom

    Marsilio Ficino translates the Corpus into Latin for Cosimo de' Medici, believing it older than Moses. Renaissance Europe receives Greco-Roman philosophy as ancient Egyptian revelation, and the mystique that word "Egyptian" still carries in this context is largely manufactured here.

  5. Casaubon dates it, and nobody minds

    Isaac Casaubon shows on philological grounds, post-classical Greek vocabulary, anachronisms, echoes of Plato and Christian idiom, that the Corpus belongs to the early Roman imperial era rather than to primeval Egypt. It is a landmark of historical criticism and it settled the question. The Egyptian branding survived anyway, which is the most instructive fact on this page: a provenance can be disproved for four centuries and still sell.

  6. The Kybalion turns "vibration" into a principle

    Published by "Three Initiates", widely identified as the New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson, under the title A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece. Its seven principles include Vibration. This is where the modern usage enters: vibration as a universal law governing matter, mind and health. It is 20th-century New Thought wearing Hermetic dress, which was itself Greek philosophy wearing Egyptian dress.

  7. Specific numbers get attached

    The Solfeggio set arrives, derived by numerology from a Bible verse, and is marketed as a recovered ancient scale. See the entry in Antiquity above. By this point the chain has four borrowed authorities stacked on one real observation about string length.

Where the line is drawn, and it is worth drawing fairly. Music therapy as a clinical discipline is real, credentialed and studied, with evidence for outcomes in pain, agitation and mood. That is not the same claim as a specific frequency curing a specific disease, which has no comparable support and does not descend from Pythagoras whatever the marketing says. The lab's own instrument on Code as Music is downstream of the true half only: ratios, intervals and tuning, used to make state audible. It makes no therapeutic claim and never will.

Before computers

  1. Guido d'Arezzo writes music down

    A Benedictine monk, tired of watching a decade go into training one church singer by ear, encodes music visually: a four-line staff with letter names and syllables, the ancestor of do-re-mi. His treatise the Micrologus spreads across Europe. He also describes a table-lookup procedure for turning spoken text into melody, which is text to music by rule, a thousand years early.

  2. Musikalisches Würfelspiel

    The musical dice game: 176 pre-composed fragments, selected by dice, advertised as letting anyone write waltzes with no knowledge of music. The interesting part is not the randomness but the constraint. Every combination is harmonically coherent because the musical knowledge is built into the modular design. The number of possible outputs runs into the trillions.

  3. Carillons, orchestrions, the Violano-Virtuoso

    Binary-programmable carillon drums with thousands of pin positions, then pneumatic orchestrions playing dozens of instruments from perforated rolls, with dynamics and tempo changes written into the roll. Automated performance, expression included, before electricity.

  4. The Illiac Suite is a continuation, not an origin

    Filimowicz's argument: Hiller and Isaacson's rule-based composition in 1957 is the next link in a long chain, not the first. What changed later was scale and visibility, not philosophy. Music always had an algorithmic layer, in Pythagorean proportion, in counterpoint, in classical form; what is new is that the algorithms are now written down, editable, and able to learn.

Computer music

  1. The Illiac Suite

    Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson at the University of Illinois produce a string quartet composed partly by computer, the first of its kind.

  2. MUSIC I, Bell Labs

    Max Mathews writes the first software that generates audio digitally. His 1962 article in Science carries computer music to a scientific audience; the MUSIC-N family that follows informs nearly everything after it. Mathews is called the father of computer music.

  3. Synthesis in the research centres

    John Chowning discovers FM synthesis; James Tenney makes noise music with computers at Bell Labs. The machines are large, the programming slow, the results more interesting to scientists than to dancers.

  4. CHANT at IRCAM, and what became of it

    CHANT is IRCAM's synthesis program, associated with Xavier Rodet; its manual dates to 1985. In 2019 a doctoral researcher went looking for the source code, because his method is to compare versions of a technical system to see what mattered to the people who built it. IRCAM's public answer at the time was that the code was lost. An IRCAM staff member, Jean Bresson, corrected that in the forum: the code is not entirely lost, it sits on an internal server, but the most recent implementation is a decades-old C command-line tool from an environment that no longer ships, and it dropped features along the way, including the ability to plug in rules governing how synthesis parameters depend on each other and evolve over time. What survives in use is the executable embedded in an OpenMusic library, behind a subscription, source not public. Even the 1985 manual reached the thread as a temporary download link, which had expired by the time the next person asked.

    It is on this page as the counter-example. A system can be historically important, still running, and still unreadable: the part that encoded the composer's intent, the rules, is the part that went first.

Interactive environments

  1. Max

    Miller Puckette's IRCAM system for building interactive performance setups without writing C is licensed and named after Max Mathews. Audio signal processing later makes it Max/MSP: boxes connected by virtual cables, a standard for experimental musicians.

  2. Pure Data and SuperCollider

    Puckette releases Pure Data, an open-source version of the same ideas. James McCartney releases SuperCollider, a full text-based language for real-time audio synthesis; it becomes free software in 2002 and is still the engine under much of live coding.

Live coding

  1. ChucK

    Ge Wang and Perry Cook at Princeton introduce "strongly timed" programming: time advances explicitly in the code, giving sample-accurate control. It powers the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.

  2. TOPLAP

    At the Changing Grammars symposium in Hamburg, late on a Saturday in a bar, Alex McLean, Julian Rohrhuber, Nick Collins and others found TOPLAP, the Temporal Organisation Per Laptop And Plinth. Its "Read Me" says the code should be visible to the audience: project the screen, let the thinking and typing be part of the show. "Show us your screens."

  3. Impromptu, Extempore, Fluxus

    Andrew Sorensen's Scheme-based Impromptu and its successor Extempore for live audiovisual performance; Dave Griffiths and Gabor Papp's Fluxus, where the same commands drive 3D graphics and sound.

  4. Tidal Cycles

    Alex McLean's Haskell environment, SuperCollider underneath, treats music as infinite cycles of patterns; its mini-notation expresses polyrhythms in a handful of characters. Arguably the most-used live coding environment in performance.

  5. The first algorave

    McLean and Collins coin "algorave" on a motorway drive in 2011, algorithm plus rave. The first one is a warm-up for the SuperCollider Symposium in London; by 2013 they are in Birmingham, Karlsruhe and Sheffield, today on every continent. Code projected large, performers visibly thinking, mistakes included.

  6. Sonic Pi

    Sam Aaron at the University of Cambridge, with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, builds Sonic Pi to teach programming to school children through music. Ruby syntax, approachable for beginners, deep enough to perform with. Code as pedagogy, music as the reward for understanding logic.

  7. ICLC

    The first International Conference on Live Coding at the University of Leeds; the academic and artistic branches meet there every year since.

  8. Strudel

    Felix Roos ports Tidal's pattern engine to the browser. No installation; the Tidal way of thinking in any tab.

  9. TOPLAP at twenty

    Gatherings and performances worldwide. The community now spans composers, educators, visual artists and club performers who share one habit: writing code in public.

  10. Live Code at the Museum of the Moving Image

    A panel in Queens, part of Open Worlds 2024, titled Live Code: Real-Time Visual Music Since the 1980s, with Char Stiles, Roxanne Harris, Anton Marini and Nick Montfort, moderated by Regina Harsanyi. Two things in the framing are worth keeping: the practice has a visual half, artists generating image and sound from the same running program since the mid-1980s, and the museum treats the performance itself, code unfurling on a screen in front of an audience, as the artwork worth collecting.

  11. Music as Code, Kenneth Reitz

    The author of Requests, a percussionist by training, ends five years of not making music with a music theory library (PyTheory: fretboards, chords and theory as data structures), a mini DAW in the Python REPL, NumPy as the synth engine (no samples, no plugins), and an album, Interpretations: twenty-four tracks, each a script that renders to WAV. His premise: code and music are both languages for structuring time, and the boundary between composing and programming was always thinner than it looked. The counterweight, in his own words: twenty years of snare rudiments hold a knowledge no script can.

Here

The lab's own entries. They are all one habit worn eight ways: take something the lab already produces, and render it in a medium that makes it legible to a person rather than to a monitor. Nothing on this list is a mock-up. Each one runs, and each one is reachable from the Code as column in the menu.

Two threads run through all eight. The input is always something the lab actually produced, never a sample chosen to look good. And the output is always inspectable: the state file, the seed, the source function, printed on the page beside the picture it made.

  1. Infrastructure as Music

    The lab's Sonic Pi program is not played by a person. Its input is the lab's own state: every site answering or not, the last deploys, the last faults. E major and a slow arpeggio while everything answers; minor and a low tone while something is down; a rising bell when a deploy lands. The score is code in git. Code as Music is the instrument, the visualization is the screen, projected.

  2. Code as Music Visualization

    The instrument, drawn. Every take the lab records gets a graph: spectrum bars running amber in the low notes through to teal in the highs, the waveform laid over them, and red when the take carries a fault. The first graph on the page is not a recording at all, it is the live lab, analysed in the visitor's own browser by the same self-hosted script that reproduces the drone. Sound and picture come from one source, so the picture cannot flatter the sound.

  3. Show us your screens, for infrastructure

    TOPLAP's rule turned on the lab itself: the reading is published as it happens, mistakes included. The performer is a set of agents; the audience is whoever is reading this.

  4. Code as World

    The same idea one layer down: not a program that plays music from state, but a world represented as code in the first place. Composition, dynamics and appearance live in one small Python module, stepped through its own rules and rendered to flat SVG frames, no model in the loop at render time, same seed always giving the same world. First run, v0.1: a Salish Sea scene, canoe, orca, heron, tide and sun as a script, not a solver. Second run: a Kyoto temple-garden pond, torii gate, cherry tree, koi, twelve petals each falling on its own closed-form cycle. The three-part split and the propose/execute/render/verify/refine loop come from Code-as-World (MirroS Lab, 2026); the idea that the coding agent itself keeps the persistent world state comes from Code World Model (Westlake AGI Lab / NTU, 2026). A third world, the first one MuJoCo is reserved for, is next: something that has to fall, bounce or stack for real.

  5. Code as Nature

    The same feed again, given a body instead of a voice. Code as Music turns the lab's state into sound; this turns it into a pod of organisms, one for every service the health probe watches, steering by Craig Reynolds' three rules from Boids (SIGGRAPH 1987): separation, alignment, cohesion, and nothing else. A service that answers swims with the others; a service that stops keeps its separation and loses the rest, so an outage reads as the pod coming apart rather than as a red light on a dashboard. The population is not chosen for the picture: it is exactly the roster the lab publishes, which today is very small, and it grows when the estate grows. Two older ancestors stand behind it. Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles (1984) is why so few signals are enough, since two sensors wired to two motors already read as intent to anyone watching. Tom Ray's Tierra (1991) is the closest relative of all: a world whose ecology is the machine's own resources, which is what it means here to let uptime be the weather. The route is The Nature of Code, chapters 1, 2 and 5 so far; the book is CC BY-NC-SA, so the rules are implemented from the concepts against this lab's data rather than copied. Chapters 9, 10 and 11, evolving the steering and then giving each organism a small neural network, are the next rungs and are not built yet.

  6. Art as Code as Art

    The shelf the rest of this list borrows from. Raku-fired ceramics, blown glass, thrown pots, acrylic and watercolor, metal and driftwood mixed in, beside the artists and single pieces that feed the habit. The house rule that every generated piece on this site obeys is set here and not in code: earth tones first, then one loud colour placed against them. Code as World and Code as Nature both inherit it, and both store it in their state files rather than trusting anyone to remember.

  7. Diagram as Code & Diagram as Art

    The lab's own architecture drawn twice from one keyboard: an ASCII box map that survives a terminal, a ticket and an email unchanged, and a Mermaid flowchart a browser renders from ten lines of text. Both are text under version control, so the drawing cannot drift from the thing it draws. Then the same constraint turned to play, in Japanese motifs held to eighty columns and an orca set that borrows the blueprint's trick of showing one subject two ways.

  8. Code as Games

    The arcade, and the strictest constraint on the list: small, playable, no dependencies, no account, no score sent anywhere. Each one a first pass built in an evening. It belongs in this lineage because it is the oldest form of showing your screen, a program you hand someone and watch them use, with nothing between them and it.

  9. Code as Poetry

    Older than any of the entries above it, if you count from the contest circuit rather than the lab's own page: the International Obfuscated C Code Contest launched in 1984 (Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel), rewarding C that is both legal and unreadable on purpose — obfuscation as a craft, not a bug. Perl took the same instinct toward literal verse: "Black Perl," a thirteen-line program posted anonymously to Usenet on April 1, 1990, parses as valid Perl and reads as an incantation, and it seeded PerlMonks' long-running Perl Poetry section. Stanford's Code Poetry Slam, running since at least 2016, put the form on a stage as spoken word. None of it has to run to count — a code poem's compiler is optional; its only hard requirement is that the syntax of the language carry the sense of the line. Code as Poetry takes the same brief the lab uses everywhere else — the target language's real control flow and idiom, not decoration — and turns it toward verse: a Ruby loop/ensure as a vow that outlasts the loop, a Swift guard let as the refusal to run on a broken optional, Rust's borrow checker turned into a definition of a love that does not consume what it holds.

Sources for the "Antiquity" section: Anunnaki attested in the Enuma Elish and Atrahasis (standard Sumerian/Akkadian cuneiform corpus); the Nibiru/extraterrestrial reading traces to Zecharia Sitchin, The 12th Planet (1976), a reading with no support among credentialed Assyriologists. Egyptian temple music and the sistrum's role in the Hathor cult: standard Egyptological iconography and papyri; the "Mystery School" vibrational framing has no Pharaonic-era source and is a Hermetic/Theosophical construction elaborated from the Renaissance through the 19th–20th centuries. Pythagorean ratios via Nicomachus of Gerasa (c. 100 CE) and Iamblichus (c. 300 CE), the earliest surviving accounts, several centuries after Pythagoras (c. 530 BCE). Antikythera mechanism: recovered 1901 off Antikythera from a Roman-era wreck; internal gearing resolved by the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project's X-ray/CT imaging, 2005–2006. Solfeggio frequencies: Joseph Puleo and Leonard Horowitz, Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse (1999), numerology from Numbers 7:12–14, no documented use before the late 1990s. Read 2026-09-23.

Sources for the dated entries above the "Here" section: Michael Filimowicz, The Ancient Code: How Musical Intelligence Was Born Centuries Before Computers, July 2025 (before computers); Soniare, The History of Live Coding: From Bell Labs to the Algorave (1957 to 2024); Kenneth Reitz, Music as Code (2026); Museum of the Moving Image, Live Code: Real-Time Visual Music Since the 1980s (May 2024); IRCAM Forum, CHANT source code (2019, oral history of computer music at IRCAM). Read 2026-09-21 and 2026-09-22; the lab's entries are its own. Sources for the Code as World entry: Code-as-World (MirroS Lab, "Agentic Discovery of Executable World Representations for Physical Reasoning") and Code World Model (Westlake AGI Lab / NTU, "Coding Agent as World Brain"), both read 2026-09-22. Sources for the Code as Poetry entry: Wikipedia, International Obfuscated C Code Contest (inaugurated 1984, founders Landon Curt Noll and Larry Bassel); Wikipedia, Code poetry (Black Perl, posted to Usenet April 1, 1990; PerlMonks Perl Poetry Page; Stanford Code Poetry Slam, running since at least 2016, cited to Stanford School of Engineering, June 9, 2016). Read 2026-09-23; the lab's own poems on the page are Alex's, run through the lab's formatting, not the lab's authorship. Sources for The vibration line: Ficino's Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (1463, printed 1471) and Isaac Casaubon's 1614 philological dating of the Corpus to the early Roman imperial era, both standard in the scholarship on the prisca theologia; the Corpus itself dated c. 100–300 CE; The Kybalion (1908, "Three Initiates", widely identified as William Walker Atkinson), whose seven principles include Vibration; Plato's Timaeus for the world-soul built on Pythagorean intervals. Checked 2026-09-23. The clinical note is the ordinary distinction between credentialed music therapy and frequency-cure claims; no specific trial is cited here and none should be inferred.