Everything Once (717 years, 273 days, 9 hours, 36 minutes)

A human/computer live performance of each of the 4,294,967,296 possible permutations of 16th note rhythms in two bars of 4/4, each one exactly once. The performance began at 6:55 PM on Feb 8, 2020 and (in the unlikely event it finishes) will complete on November 7, 2736 at 4:31 AM. Streamed directly from Ableton Live to YouTube from Vancouver, Canada.

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The woodblock is performing the 717 year, 273 day, 9 hour, 36 minute long sequence, accompanied by generative music created with probabilistic sequencers in Ableton. The non-woodblock music will be frequently updated by a human (me, maybe others?) with new sounds.

Let me know what you think, suggestions welcome.

gabe.boothroyd@gmail.com

Last update: Feb 10, 2020 adjusted a bunch of the probabilities and got the waves working again.

Subscribe for upcoming video breaking down how this is being created.

Thanks to Karl Dicaire for mixing, Brendan Stookey for additional sound design, George Vlad for the beautiful field recordings, Sean and James for first listening to the idea, Kayla for listening to a lot of ideas, Kent for getting excited about the idea, and Ableton for letting you put in follow action times of 11 years.

Check out my band at fivealarmfunk.com and @fivealarmfunk on Instagram.

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Here's some of the nitty gritty of how I sequenced the 717 year pattern:

There's 32 MIDI tracks (one for each beat subdivision in the two bar phrase) with follow actions in Ableton that turn each beat subdivision "on" (so it contains a woodblock hit) or "off" in regular cycles. For example, the "and" of beat 1 of the 2nd bar has a 4 bar cycle, "on" for 2 bars, then "off" for 2 bars. Beat 2 of the 1st bar has a 8,192 bar cycle, "on" for 4,096 bars then "off" for 4,096 bars. By turning one track on or off every two bars, another every 4 bars, another every 8 bars and so forth (all the way up to 4,294,967,296 bars on and 4,294,967,296 bars off for the final track) all possible combinations of rhythms will be performed over the course of the piece.

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