All right, so calling these “musical instruments” isn’t particularly helpful. They are instruments in that they can be used to make music in the broadest sense of the word. A Day That Will Never Happen Again is basically a drum machine. Here You Are, You Are Here is a synthesizer. And Everything You Love Will One Day Be Taken From You is a sampler… sort of. But their interfaces are highly unusual, to say the least. And they’re designed, quite specifically, to prevent you from re-creating or repeating things.

There are no keyboards or fretboards. You can’t practice scales until you master them. Instead, they’re plywood boxes with a few knobs or buttons, and a small computer like the Raspberry Pi inside. Each one operates according to what Seznec described to me as a “very specific, very impractical rule” that is then explored to its most extreme.

For example Volume 1: A Day That Will Never Happen Again basically looks like a book made of plywood, with four knobs and a button on the front. Inside is a Raspberry Pi and a Teensy microcontroller. What it does is simple (in theory): Every day it plays a new and unique rhythm. You’ll never be able to replicate the pattern it played August 4, 2019, because that day is gone and with it the specific set of variables that created it.

But getting to a place where the machine is capable of creating something that can’t be re-created requires a lot of moving parts. Inside the instrument is a library of 123 samples collected by Seznec on a single day: December 15, 2018. And every day a unique seven-digit number derived from the year and date is used to seed a random number generator. The results then determine which 10 of those samples get used, generates a pattern for each one and sets the controls for the “other” knob (which we’ll get to in a bit).

Now the knobs on the front allow you to tweak things, but they really only give you the illusion of control. Most of the major decisions have already been made for you. The rate knob allows you to change the speed at which the pattern plays back. The program Seznec built using Pure Data (the same language used to create patches for Critter & Guitari’s Organelle) can scale to 3,000 BPM from 60. Though, as he’s quick to tell me, “it’s a good illustration of how BPM is a relative measure more than a scientific one. … When you get faster, our ears start to group those beats together — so rather than feeling like it is playing at 1,000bpm […] it actually can feel more like 16th notes playing at 250 BPM. … The faster it gets the more pronounced this effect becomes, though once it gets really fast the samples certainly start to all blend together and create more of a texture than a rhythm.”

The inside of Volume 1: A Day That Will Never Happen Again

The length knob changes the duration of the samples. The original recording might be several seconds of keys jangling. But if you turn the knob all the way down it becomes short, clipped and barely identifiable. Meanwhile, the steps knob changes the number of steps in the pattern from one all the way up to 50. All of these parameters interact and can dramatically change the sound of the daily rhythm pattern, but the core ingredients remain unchanged.

And Seznec isn’t done throwing curveballs yet. The fourth knob on the front is labeled “other”; it controls, well, other parameters. As he explains, “it will be a different set of parameters each day.” For instance, it could be a pitch shifter or a probability setting. Each of those is mapped to random slopes so the knob doesn’t even control all those parameters in the same way. In short, try as you might to recapture a moment with A Day That Will Never Happen Again, “it will not do what you want it to do.”

Creating obstacles like this for a user is something that Seznec frequently explores. And is informed in part by his time spent running a small indie-game studio, and game design is, as he says, “in a lot of ways about making stuff harder for people.”

In Volume 2: Here You Are, You Are Here (which was revealed yesterday) the obstacle is, unsurprisingly, location. It uses a Bela board (similar to BeagleBone but with a focus on audio processing) and GPS to power a granular synthesizer and an incredibly powerful metaphor. Granular synthesis works by breaking apart recorded sounds into tiny grains and then recombining them in various ways to create your synth tone. In this case, the source material is a recording of Seznec’s son playing piano in their home in Scotland — a country and home he’s preparing to leave.

All of the synth’s parameters are controlled by the GPS. The only thing controlled by the knobs on the front are volume and pitch. Everything else, from the attack and release, grain size, panning, number of grains playing, etc., is determined by the instrument’s physical location — to a resolution of just a few feet. As Seznec told me, the instrument is “about leaving this place I’ve lived in for 13 years, and also about the sounds that I’m not going to hear. … We only remember these tiny little snippets of days … it becomes about that intersection of memory and place. There are grains of sound, like literally actually grains of that recording, that I will never hear, because I won’t go to the right place to hear them. In the same way, that time that I recorded it and that day I recorded it and that moment, I don’t actually remember it all. There are grains of that memory that are gone as well, and I’m not getting those back.”