A loop, once committed to code, circulates with a fidelity the human mind cannot emulate. In the language of generative music, such repetitions—subject to gentle corrosion or mutation—become both signature and disguise. Consider a phrase rendered in Max/MSP: a cycle of pitched drones, mapped outside traditional bar-lines, shifting every 7.3 seconds. A process emerges: the transparent automation of duration, weighted randomness governing when, or if, new material emerges. Probability curves are drawn—a random object governs whether a filter opens by 12dB every ten minutes, or closes into velvet silence.

Yet the illusion arises: is this dispersal, or secret continuity? Each instance appears different, but through the logarithmic curve of probabilities, patterns freighted with memory surface—fleeting, then gone. Generative structures function less as distant algorithms than as stealth artisans. Eno’s Discreet Music, for instance, enacted this longing: tape loops of differing lengths, exposed to gradual asynchronicity. In digital systems, the mutation occurs through code rather than tape tension, but the effect—a gentle erosion of certainty—remains intact. The result is a listening state in which the mind, uncertain whether it recalls a motif or invents it anew, relinquishes the need to fix boundaries.

Generativity, in this dispersed mode, resists the imposture of digital traceability or administrative completeness. It proposes music as something provisional, always just out of reach of documentation—heard, perhaps, but never conclusively pinned to a ledger of events. In such territory, continuity is a rumour woven from forgotten returns, the echo at the farthest margin of an unattended algorithm.