A musengine is an experiment in cognitive persistence, the idea that a person can view a series of words or phrases shown in rapid succession through a grid structure and receive inspiration or other ideas based on the connections they make between the words or phrases they read.

I built it in WordPress through a grid-based page constructor and a plug-in that lets one scroll through a series of words.

The grid consists of 60 spaces, 6 across and 10 deep, that each rotate a vocabulary of 293 words or short phrases and 57 spacer marks, the ×. The words and spacers are consistent across the 60 spaces but they’ve been randomized for each space.

Bandwidth-wise it’s an absolute beast and takes forever to load.

The engine is designed so that the viewer can make out about 3-5 words at any one time before they are replaced, rotating every 3 seconds. The viewer can scan in any direction or make connections just through the progress of the words in one space.

The spaces are all timed to start at once and cycle for 3 seconds each. Any variation you see is due to a variety of factors including the hosting processor load, net bandwidth, local processing speed and what browser one is using, meaning that while the arrangement of words per space is set, the way those come up in connection with the other spaces is hugely localized.

What you see below is not actually the musengine. It’s a screengrab I made when I’d first designed it, an hour long, just over one full rotation. The background is an animation of what aether could look like. It used to be the background for the actual musengine. I swapped it to a gradient once Chrome killed autoplay for video backgrounds.

For most people, the video will be the easiest way to see what I’m talking about with a minimum of fuss and resource allocation.

The sound is an abstract of how I’d like to think the foundations of creation sound in a way our brains could comprehend. Anyway, try it with headphones.

To see the musengine itself, click here. It’s been acting a bit flaky lately, so if words don’t come up after a minute or so, put the window into developer mode. That should correct whatever is going strange with it. All you have to do after that is leave developer mode and it’ll stay corrected.

In either case, it’s designed to be viewed as fullscreen as possible.

If you do happen to receive any inspiration or ideas from the engine, I’d love to hear about it. Just click here to go to the form.

Unless it compels you to do something horrible, in which case you’re on your own.