Stochastic Music Box in Minecraft

When I started playing with Minecraft's note blocks, I quickly felt that I needed to take advantage of the unique medium by coming up with different ways of incorporating redstone mechanics into the music. In this machine, a network of sequences is connected by random branches, a little trick accomplished using a dropper, hopper, and comparator.

I came up with this idea back in March. After sketching the network, I determined the chord changes such that no matter what path around the network is taken a filtered set is privileged, and then wrote the arpeggio sequences. The music, except the ending, is not itself stochastic, but is highly arbitrary; the time signatures, chord inversions, and instrument types were all distributed semi-smoothly across the network. A couple weeks later SilverSpade and I put together two of the sequences, (the 2 in the very center, 14:54 - 14:58 in the video) and in the last 2 weeks we played basically nonstop to finish up the rest. It comprises a little more than 2200 note blocks and has 12 random binary gates. The timings aren't perfectly set, (ideally it would be a steady stream of 16th notes) but it's solved to the degree to which I'm willing to put effort into it.

Here's the original music:    • Minecraft Piece  

Here's an earlier version of the project that had a bug that caused the pulse to duplicate:    • Minecraft - Stochastic Music Machine ...