mass-crescendo

mass-crescendo puts a slow tide under your dynamics: form measured in minutes, not bars.

Dynamics can be the architecture, the way Ravel’s Bolero is nothing but one quarter-hour crescendo. This effect scales every note-on velocity by a periodic envelope anchored at your first note: with shape="arch", the default, it rises to full strength at the period’s midpoint and falls away again, a long swell; with shape="ramp" it climbs across the whole period and resets, a sawtooth that keeps beginning again. The scale runs from 1 - depth at the envelope’s floor up to full strength at its peak, so depth=0 changes nothing and depth=1 sinks the troughs to a whisper.

Your local shaping rides on top: accents stay accents, the tide just decides how high the whole sea is. Nothing here is random and there is no seed; the same period gives the same architecture every time. Note-offs and everything else pass untouched.

Parameters

period= takes a duration string like "120s", or beats= against the tempo, never both; it must come to at least one second. See Time and tempo.

Parameter	Type	Default	Range
period	duration string	"120s"	at least 1s
beats	number	none (instead of period)	finite, at least 1s once resolved
depth	number	0.6	0..=1
shape	string	"arch"	"arch", "ramp"

Example

miditool.kdl

input "Roland"
output virtual="miditool Out"

mass-crescendo period="120s" depth=0.6      // a two-minute swell and release

Improvise for a few minutes and listen back: whatever you played, it now has a shape.

Try this

The Bolero engine. A deep ramp in beats keeps the architecture locked to the tempo:

tempo 120

mass-crescendo beats=128 depth=0.9 shape="ramp"

Everything climbs out of near-silence over 64 seconds, then the floor drops out and the climb begins again. Feed it something already patterned, say a euclidean-gate upstream, and the repetition plus the ramp does most of the composing for you.