Canyon
Groove

Generate music with canyons

33⅓ · side A

Relief

Width

Key

Mood

Contour

Loops

Echo

Source

01Choose a canyon

real elevation and topography

02Voices

select your voices for the loop

03Share

capture what you created

Electron-microscope photograph of a stylus resting in a record groove. Labels point to the needle and to the waves of the left and right channels cut into the groove walls. — A stylus in a record groove under an electron microscope. Posted to r/vinyl by Total_Doofuss484, 2022.

Where this came from

When I saw this photograph, where the magnified microscopic record player needle sits between the vinyl record’s tracks I thought the groove walls looked like canyon walls. They look ridged and layered, and the shape of those walls is the music. I wondered whether it works the other way round. Could you take a real canyon, treat the cross-section as a groove, and use AI to drag a needle through the canyon grooves?

How it works

Each canyon here is a real elevation profile, rim to rim, measured at 100 points. The floor sets the key. The shape of the walls sets the mood. The width sets how long one pass takes, and the depth sets the echo.

Every voice crosses the profile at its own speed, and no two speeds line up. They fall in and out of step, so the music keeps changing. Two minutes in you have heard a piece. Twenty minutes in it still has not repeated.

Making your own

Switch voices on and off, change their instruments, and adjust them while the music plays. The link holds everything, so anyone you send it to hears the same song.