Seeds

Every random effect takes a seed, and everything it ever does follows from it. That is most of the stochastic palette, from shuffle-lock, loose-keys, restrike, and registral-scatter through poisson-cloud, note-roulette, velocity-dice, duration-lottery, and density-governor to added-value, feldman-field, and anti-accent, plus the five generators (continuum, metronome-swarm, brownian-walker, mechanico, and continuator), the pedal-driven crippled-looper (whose loop warps one seeded detail per pass, so the same seed is the same slow deformation), the effects that are only sometimes random (wedge-mirror below 1.0 probability, klangfarben in random mode, aggregate-gate with leak) and the rng() helpers in scripts. Even the moments sequencer, which wanders between scenes on its own clock, draws its dwells and destinations from a seed, and manual switches never consume a draw, so the wander survives interference. There is no unseeded randomness anywhere in miditool.

Same seed, same behavior, forever

shuffle-lock seed=42

This is the same permutation of the keys today, tomorrow, on your laptop, and on the studio machine. Restarting miditool changes nothing. Recording a take and recreating it next week changes nothing. A seed is part of the piece, the way a key signature is.

The seed is any unsigned 64-bit integer. There is nothing special about any value; seed=1 and seed=982347 are equally random-looking, just different.

Rerolling

Want a different scramble? Edit the number:

shuffle-lock seed=43

With live editing, rerolling is an instrument you play: save, hear the new mapping on the next note, keep rolling until something sings. When you find it, the number in the file is the sound; commit it, write it on the score, send it to a friend.

Why this makes scrambled keyboards learnable

An unseeded scramble would be a novelty: every session a new instrument, nothing carries over. A seeded scramble is a stable instrument that happens to be strange. shuffle-lock seed=42 rewards practice exactly the way a piano does; your hands learn where the notes went, and the knowledge keeps. That is the founding idea of miditool: randomness as a compositional decision you make once, not noise that happens to you per session.

Two independent random effects in one config just take two seeds:

fork {
    chain {
        key-range lo=21 hi=59
        loose-keys seed=7 sigma=3.5
    }
    chain {
        key-range lo=60 hi=108
        loose-keys seed=11 lo=72 hi=96
    }
}

Reusing a seed across two effects is fine too; they draw independently, the numbers just start from the same place.