01Why it exists
It has taste, and it gets bored of itself
muse keeps a persistent aesthetic self-model: trait weights for density, dissonance and brightness, and a fatigue level. When a trait stays satisfied too long, fatigue forces a deliberate self-violation and inverts the dominant trait for one piece. It's allowed to make something it will probably hate. That's the originality mechanism: a tediversion.
It runs on a schedule you don't set, keeps what clears its own bar, and purges the rest. Your verdicts move its taste slowly: about twelve consistent ones to shift a trait.
02Parts list
- Synthesis from scratchAdditive and FM synthesis in pure numpy at 32 kHz, and a formant-based singing voice instead of a TTS wrapper.
- CompositionMotifs transposed, inverted, played backwards and stretched; every piece keeps its lineage in SQLite.
- Language is optionalKeys only buy it words (briefs, titles, lyrics, reflections), routed through free tiers with local fallback. Cold start works fully offline.
- Small on purpose73–80 MB of memory on an Android phone under Termux, about 56 seconds a render, pausing itself if it goes over budget.
03Construction
The bugs that taught it
The runaway bar: a keep-rate controller could only ratchet up; it reached 0.84 and started destroying work scoring 0.72. It's now a quantile tracker bounded to [0.28, 0.78]. Equal peak isn't equal loudness: bass vanished and hats fizzed. Inverse A-weighting per note, filtered percussion and a master tilt fixed it, found by analysing a real rendered WAV.
04Tolerances
The live node is private. The page explains it; listening needs an invite. The voice is crude next to a neural vocoder, by choice.
what it is not, said plainly
05Inscription
2,369 lines. It keeps what clears its own bar.
06The same room
- AutoFaberA mind with a name that remembers you, talks with you out loud and calls on every AI model you can reach: one at a time, as a council, or as a swarm that builds whole projects.
- WeaverA persistent, autonomous entity running locally
- NobodyA voice assistant that runs on the phone itself, not in an app store
- Phone MCPA console for any MCP server: connect to your own over Streamable HTTP, list its tools and call them with forms built from their schemas, or watch a simulated model drive a demo Android phone through ADB.
- MoodfieldFour small simulated networks that model shifting emotional state, with a guide to what each one does, live controls, and a straight account of what the runs do not prove.
- LexiconThe words this work needed and didn't have, from verel to mentifaber: each one defined, dated, sourced and citable.