Sonogram

Input.
The microphone, opened live, or up to eight synthesised loops named after tracks they only evoke — Everything, Weird Fishes, Treefingers, Idioteque, Pyramid, The Anthem, Bloom, Lotus — so no track is anyone's master. Stack as many as you like, live: they mix through one bus and drift against each other, so the same combination rarely repeats.

Transformation.
Whatever plays is read like a spectrograph — time left to right, frequency climbing bottom to top, amplitude turned to ink. Quiet reads near paper, loud toward the deep; the most intense energy is allowed a single note of signal red. Bass falls as thick bands, treble as fine hair. Capture freezes the window, prints a paper strip, and titles the plate by its peak frequency and the number of layers caught.

Note.
Every other piece in this collection begins in silence and waits for input. Sonogram is already sounding when you arrive; the input is which sounds you fold into which others. The plate is not a picture of sound but a print where sound was the pressing — amplitude for ink, frequency for altitude — and it carries, as its title, the reading it just took of itself.