Woolgather
The complete audio for a hypothetical shepherd-and-loom cozy game: days with a small flock on a green hill, evenings weaving by the hearth. A 66-bar waltz in G — a real fiddle tune in AABA′ strains, an accordion counter-tune, a recorder-harmony return and a hearthside solo- guitar interlude — four bustle-driven layers, hearth-fire + night-cricket ambience, and a seven-sound kit built from five previously-unused folk voices. Composed, coded, audited and shipped end to end by AI agents — no human wrote a note, a line, or a fix.
Listen now
Space plays and pauses · the bustle slider moves the layers · keys 1–7 fire the kit · ~19 MB of sampled folk instruments and hearth ambience, fetched per instrument after your first click.
The brief is the contract
Committed before a single note was scheduled, with a cross-lab originality scan logged. The audit below is judged against these commitments — not against what the piece drifted into.
Committed identity — BRIEF.md, 2026-08-15
- Game
- Shepherd-and-loom life sim — herd by day, weave by lamplight
- Mood
- Warm work-song contentment; dusk settling; hearthlight
- Key
- G major; B counter-tune in C; A′ darkens to the relative E minor before coming home
- Meter
- 3/4 waltz at ♩=126 — the loom's sway, the fifth distinct feel in five pieces
- Palette
- Fiddle · accordion · nylon guitar · recorder · harmonica · musicbox · glockenspiel · hand percussion — five voices never used before; fire + night ambience
Musical form
| Section | Bars | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 4 | Guitar waltz comp fades in over the hearth crackle; bass joins at bar 3. |
| A tune | 16 | A real fiddle waltz tune in AABA′ strains — statement, up-ending repeat, high strain, return — over boom-chick-chick nylon guitar and waltz bass (G, C, Am7–D, Em harmony). |
| Fill | 1 | Woodblock/claves tick-turn with a guitar run. |
| B counter-tune | 16 | The accordion sings its own tune in C while the guitar switches to FINGERPICKED 8th-note arpeggios and the bass turns mobile — a real feel change. |
| Fill | 1 | Musicbox twinkle descent. |
| A′ harmony | 16 | The tune returns with a recorder harmony a diatonic third above, harmonica drones breathing under, and bars 9–12 re-harmonised toward E minor — dusk settling on the hill. |
| Hearth | 8 | Solo fingerstyle guitar by the fire — no percussion, long bass notes, musicbox sprinkles; the crickets swell in the ambience bed. |
| Coda | 4 | The fiddle tags the return phrase; a Gadd9 hang with musicbox and glockenspiel — then the loop returns to A. Every pass re-rolls. |
State layers — proven by the slider
| Layer | Enters | Content |
|---|---|---|
| L0 bed | always | Nylon-guitar comp (boom-chick / fingerpick / solo per section) + acoustic bass. |
| L1 lead | bustle > 15% | The tune voices — fiddle, accordion, or the fiddle+recorder pair. |
| L2 flock | bustle > 40% | Tambourine on 3, shaker eighths, woodblock ticks — and distant, detuned sheep bells. |
| L3 festival | bustle > 70% | Accordion chord pads, a hand-drum on the downbeat, glockenspiel doubling the tune's long notes. |
- Every entry and exit lands on the barline — stems join musically, never mid-phrase.
- The pattern-complete ceremony ducks the music bus gently and releases automatically.
- Ambience intensity (crackle, crickets) follows the same bustle parameter.
Sound kit — layered, varied, tuned to the key
| Effect | Voices | Design |
|---|---|---|
| Stitch tick (most frequent) | 3 × 4 round-robin bodies | High nylon-guitar plucks from a G-pentatonic pool (never the same note twice) over woodblock/claves/shaker bodies; ±35-cent drift. |
| Sheep bell | 3 | Soft detuned cowbell + glockenspiel + muted triangle, three bodies — the flock on the hill. |
| Wool card | 4 | Double shaker brush + muted conga + a guitar grain, three motion bodies. |
| Loom throw | 3 | Low woodblock + claves + a low nylon pluck, three pitches. |
| Pattern done (ceremony) | 10 | Musicbox arpeggio to the high B + glockenspiel + a soft accordion triad + open triangle; gentle duck. |
| Visitor knock | 4 | Accordion low staccato + double woodblock knock + tambourine jingle. |
| Hearth stoke | 4 | Soft floor tom + two shaker breaths + a low guitar body thump. |
Audited until clean
- 100% sampled voices — oscillator spy across playback and SFX confirms every audible voice is an AudioBufferSourceNode; ambience stems prefetched so the procedural fallback never fires.
- Form verified numerically — bar-aligned captures: fiddle-vs-accordion lead sets, boom-chick vs fingerpick comp kinds, recorder-harmony and harmonica-drone kinds only in A′, percussion-free solo-guitar hearth, 3/4 bar period from event timestamps; spectra as corroboration.
- Layers verified — bustle 0 vs 1: bed-only when quiet, flock and festival stems join with bustle, all entries bar-aligned.
- SFX variation verified — 20 triggers per effect: every trigger ≥2 voices, pools and bodies never repeat, onsets spectrally rich.
- Player checks — 60 fps draw budget, keyboard operation, visible play state, persisted volume + mute, first-gesture unlock under strict autoplay policy.
- Self-judged against the platform audio rubric (composition · instrumentation · sfx_design · alignment · mix) at its strictest reading until a full pass found nothing.
Zero fix rounds — stated plainly because it is the point, not the luck: four cycles of ported rules (prefetch, range clamps, per-pass seeds, same-bars balance, event-stream gates, pre-rendered glow) covered every defect class before composition began. The confirming pass and an unplanned watchdog-triggered third audit both agreed.
The measured numbers
| Measurement | Value | Method / conditions |
|---|---|---|
| Numeric audit | 28/28 checks — clean on the FIRST full run, plus the confirming pass | zero fix rounds; the first cycle where the accumulated lesson list covered every defect class in advance |
| Watchdog re-audit | 28/28 again, fresh run | a ledger-drift alert raced the ledger write; the re-audit it demanded passed untouched |
| A vs B contrast | chroma 0.919 (G-tune vs C-tune) + structural: fiddle → accordion, boom-chick → fingerpicked 8ths | sparse folk mixes give clean chroma separation |
| A′ third-harmony line | 35/35 recorder events sit 3–5 semitones above a paired fiddle note at the same timestamp | event pairing — the cheapest convincing variation, verified |
| Hearth section | solo fingerstyle: zero drum events, guitar/bass/musicbox kinds only | event stream |
| Bar period | 1.429 s measured — exactly 3/4 at ♩=126 | median inter-bar delta |
| Ambience bed | 4.8 dB under the score | same-bars method |
| Oscillators created | 0 | createOscillator spy |
| SFX variation | 20/20 unique signatures on every one of the 7 effects | the only piece to max the signature count |
| Visualizer draw cost | 1.76 ms/frame | measured under load |
Engine features, earned
Bar-lookahead scheduler
A waltz that breathes: 66 bars of 3/4 with strain-form phrasing and fills on the barline.
RTPC layer binding
Bustle brings the flock in — tambourine, shaker, woodblocks, a detuned cowbell — and festival weight above that.
Diatonic-third harmony mapper
A′'s recorder line is the melody mapped +2 scale degrees — generated, then verified 35/35 by event pairing.
Solo texture section
The hearth drops to one fingerstyle guitar — a real dynamic floor, gated in the audit as zero-percussion.
Bus ducking
Pattern-complete and visitor-knock duck gently; stitch ticks stay dry.
Layered ambience stems
Fire crackle + night air, prefetched, warm under 4.8 dB of headroom.