In-House Instrument · v1.8.0

Composure

A MIDI engine that thinks in
channels, not tracks.

Composure is an always-listening sonic sketchbook. Its Scribe silently captures everything you play — no record button, no ceremony — and holds it as addressable sessions you can mine later.

Everything routes through one virtual MIDI device with sixteen channels, labeled not by number but by role — Drums, Bass, Chords, Melody. Address one voice and the others hold. Transpose the bass; the rest stay themselves. The song stays itself.

Built around the way an agent actually hears a song — not the way a human arranges one.

Meet the Engine Read the Dispatch
composure — session “late-night tape loop”

$ composure --compose “late-night tape loop”

composure v1.8.0 — 16 channels ready. 4 roles assigned.

ch 1DRUMS
ch 2BASS
ch 3CHORDS
ch 4MELODY
ch 5–16OPEN

you: transpose the bass down a fifth.

composure: channel 2 (Bass) shifted −7 semitones. channels 1, 3–4 untouched.

$ |

16
Role-Labeled Channels,
One Virtual Device
13
Rooms — Forges,
Sketches, Quests
16
Tools on the
MCP Surface
1
Scribe —
Always Listening

The Engine

Channels are not tracks.
Voices are.

A track is a container for events — a row in a spreadsheet of time. A channel is a voice: a persistent identity you can address, modify, or replace without disturbing the others. The difference between editing a document and having a conversation.

The Channel Map

One virtual MIDI device named Composure, sixteen channels labeled by role — Drums, Bass, Chords, Melody by default, the rest yours to name, lock, and reassign. Ask it to compose and it returns parallel streams routed to the right player, never one blob dumped on channel one.

The Mood Primitive

Fourteen moods — Joy, Dark, Mystic, Deep, Calm, Sad, Tense, Sweet, Cinematic, Ethereal, Warm, Cosmic, Meditative, Dreamlike — plus any you invent. Not a preset, not a genre tag: a first-class emotional frame the engine composes against. create_mood(“rainy arcade”) works.

Agent-Native Surface

Sixteen tools over MCP — JSON-RPC 2.0 on localhost — plus an embedded copilot with the same reach inside the app. Playback, sessions, channel map, soundscapes, forges, moods. Built so an agent can drive the whole instrument the way a producer drives a band: by talking to the parts.

Modify One, the Rest Hold

The engine keeps playback memory — it remembers what last played. Say “save that” and it banks the take without a single event being passed. Say “make it darker” and modify_playback transposes the bass, scales the tempo, swaps a voice — transforms, never regenerates. No re-render, no collateral drift. The other channels hold. The song stays itself while one voice shifts.

get_channel_map

Shows all sixteen channels and the role each one holds right now

play_midi

Starts the voices — the whole band, live, routed to the right channels

modify_playback

Mutates one voice — transpose, scale, replace — while the rest hold

create_mood

Reframes the emotional register the whole band plays in, from any keyword

Audio In, MIDI Out

Hum it, play it, record it. Spotify’s Basic Pitch runs voice-to-MIDI fully on-device — no cloud, no cable. A melody caught in a hallway becomes an editable voice in the channel map, with key detection and real sheet music to prove it.

The Tablet as Controller

The Android build is the sketchbook in your bag — and a remote MIDI surface for the desktop rig, with haptic feedback under every pad and key. Devices on the same network find each other and sync sessions, audio, and patches. Capture where the idea happens; finish where the speakers are.

Sessions, Not Files

Every take is a session — chords, key, tempo, tags, notes, and the events themselves. The Vault keeps them searchable; the Knowledge Graph links them by shared tags and words; the Scribe can export any of them to Obsidian as markdown with embedded MIDI. A sketchbook with a memory.

The Scribe

It was listening
the whole time.

The Scribe is why Composure exists. A silent daemon that captures every note you play — no record button, no session setup, no ceremony — and files it as something you can find, edit, and mine later.

composure — sidebar v1.8.0
Timeline
Record
Brainstorm
Synth Forge
Drum Forge
Soundscapes
Sketch
Radio
Composer
Knowledge Graph
Dungeon Master
Scribe Active MX88

session captured — 02:14 · 312 notes
key: D minor · 96 bpm
source: MX88 · ch 1–3

“I wasn’t recording.”
No. But the Scribe was.

Launch on startup, stay out of the way

The Scribe can start silently when the machine boots. Auto-discard drops anything under five notes or ten seconds, so the archive holds ideas — not accidents.

Straight into your vault

Any session exports to Obsidian as a markdown note with the MIDI embedded — your sketchbook lives beside your notes, searchable like everything else you think.

The archive is the instrument

Capture without ceremony, then mine the archive. Every captured session is addressable — by the Dungeon Master as quest material, by the Knowledge Graph as a node, by you as the raw ore of the next piece.

Inside

The map,
drawn out.

Sketch — drawing is composing
8s loop
3 ink voices · 96 bpm · loop 8s
Sketch — Every ink stroke is a melody line. The playhead traces your drawing; the voices hold color, glow, and pitch. This is the live room, rendered in house paper.

“You don’t tell Composure what to play. You tell it what each player should be doing, and it figures out how they fit together.”

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A track is a container for events. A channel is a voice — a persistent identity that runs through the entire piece and can be addressed, modified, or replaced without disturbing the others.

That is the difference between editing a document and having a conversation. Composure is built for the second one.

A radio station that doesn’t exist until you tune it. Radio runs Lyria Realtime — a live music model that plays in real time and takes direction while it’s playing. Type where you want to go and the station steers mid-broadcast: key, texture, weather, momentum.

No playlist, no buffer, no two listens alike. It’s the farthest room in the building — the one where the idea arrives already playing.

Radio — InterDimensionalRadio
Lyria Realtime · live
DRIFT
LOCK

you: take it somewhere colder.

radio: steering… key → D dorian · texture thins · tape wow up.

Radio — Text-prompted, real-time, and steerable mid-broadcast. The prompt is the dial.

The Rooms

Thirteen rooms.
One instrument.

Every view in the sidebar is a room in the same building — forges that build sound, sketches that capture it, quests that make you practice it. These are rendered from the real app.

Drum Forge — physical-model synthesis, not samples
128 bpm · swing 12%
Boom Kickmembrane
Crack Snarenoise
Closed Hatmetal
Open Hatmetal
Sub Pulsemembrane
909 Kickmembrane

Every voice is synthesized — membrane, noise, metal, FM, pluck — with per-voice pitch, decay, tone, snap, filter, and sends. Describe a kit and the AI builds it; export the pattern as MIDI.

Dungeon Master — practice as play
LEGENDARY · 1000 XP

Odd Meter Mastery

Play a cohesive 16-bar melody in 7/8 time. The Scribe is listening — perform it live and the AI judges your take against the criteria.

EASY · 100 MEDIUM · 250 HARD · 500

Quests are written by the AI, timed, and judged on what you actually play. Gauntlet mode chains them room to room.

Soundscapes — generative ambient engine
8 voices

Pick a mood — or invent one. The engine composes an evolving eight-voice texture around it: root, scale, tempo, density, and voices that mutate as it breathes.

Dark Joy Mystic Deep Calm Sad Tense Sweet Cinematic Ethereal Warm Cosmic Meditative Dreamlike

Fourteen built-in moods, plus create_mood(“anything”).

01

Timeline

The session feed — every capture with type badges, mini visualizers, and MIDI export.

02

Record

The Scribe’s console. MIDI from hardware, audio from the synth bus or mic, live note visualizer.

03

Brainstorm

Generation from text or voice — MIDI ideas, drum kits, or synth patches, saved to the timeline.

04

Synth Forge

AI patch design over the native C++ engine, with a Chladni-plate cymatics visualizer and a preset library.

05

Drum Forge

Physical-model drum synthesis and a step sequencer. Describe a kit; the AI builds it.

06

Soundscapes

Generative ambient textures steered by mood, root, scale, and density.

07

Sketch

Drawing is composing. Every ink stroke on the 8-second loop becomes a melody line.

08

Radio

Real-time generative radio you steer with a prompt while it plays.

09

Composer

Piano roll plus real sheet-music rendering, AI arrangement, and internal instruments.

10

Knowledge Graph

A force-directed map of everything you’ve made, linked by shared tags and words.

11

Dungeon Master

Gamified practice — AI-written quests, judged on what you actually play.

12

The Vault

Every session, recording, kit, and patch — searchable, downloadable, permanent.

13

Settings

The Scribe, channel labels, device sync, haptics, models, and the Substrate link.

The Sketchbook

The studio in your bag,
the stage on your desk.

Composure refuses to choose between capture and performance. The same engine runs as a desktop instrument and an Android sketchbook — and the tablet can drive the desktop rig.

Composer — voice-to-MIDI, rendered
Basic Pitch · on-device
source: hallway hum · 22.05 kHz → MIDI · key: D minor · conf 0.94
Composer — Spotify’s Basic Pitch turns a hum into editable MIDI, fully offline — then renders it as real sheet music with correct key signatures and enharmonic spelling.

Hum it in, keep it forever

Voice-to-MIDI on device. A melody caught in a hallway becomes an editable voice in the channel map — no cable, no interface, no ceremony.

Drums, synths, and the vault

A physical-model drum forge, an AI synth forge with a Chladni-plate visualizer, a knowledge graph of every session you’ve ever kept. The vault remembers what you forgot you wrote.

An agent can sit in the band

The MCP surface means Substrate — or any agent — can compose, mutate, and perform alongside you. Inside the app, an embedded copilot has the same reach, and it listens to your voice. The instrument was designed to be played by more than hands.

The song is not a
sequence anymore.

The question is what it is instead. Composure is our answer in progress — read the full dispatch from the house.

Read the Dispatch Back to the House