A continuous pitch instrument where every position is decided by a small crowd. The instrument shows the crowd's pitch over time as a flowing river; you tap anywhere on the field to place your own vote inside it.
How to play
- Tap anywhere on the pitch field to place your vote. Drag vertically to move it. The cyan dashed line is you; the amber river is the crowd flowing through time.
- Voters cluster around your gesture; some scatter to nearby pitches. The right edge of the field shows the live distribution.
- Switch between Mean, Mode, and Chord to hear how different counting rules pick the collective pitch from the same distribution.
Controls
ModeMean averages the pitches voted for. Mode picks the single most-voted pitch from the histogram. Chord plays the top three peaks together.
VotersCrowd size, 2 to 30,000.
What this demonstrates
Piano discretizes the keyboard into twelve named pitches per octave; this prototype removes that discretization, so the pitch space is continuous. With infinite resolution, Mean converges hard toward the middle of disagreement. Mode has to bucket pitches into bins to find a peak, and the bin width quietly controls how decisive the vote feels. Even when the voters haven't moved, the three rules can pick very different pitches from the same distribution. The continuous space exposes how the categories we agree to use shape the democratic outcome; what gets named matters as much as how the votes are counted.