worm-blossom

The song for week 41 of year 2025.

When we started worm-blossom.org, pretty much the only thing we knew for certain was that Sam would do a comic/drawing every week, and I would do a matching piece of music. We quickly abandoned the part where the music would always match the comic, simply because occasionally the comic is the last missing piece before we can release an update. But at least in this glorious first week, the comic was finished well ahead of time, and I could sit down and write some fun music to mine to.

The song for week 42 of year 2025.

This song I wrote in advance of the comic, but with a few adjustments it ended up fitting the third panel — a creative walk in the park — quite nicely.

I’m a sucker for these plain oscillators with sliding note transitions. Write a melody for one, later add another one, and you always get a pleasant result =)

Harmonically (and sound-wise), a couple days after finishing this I realised that it is extremely close to Cherry Wine by Hozier. Oh well.

The song for week 43 of year 2025.

After I saw that week’s comic, I was pretty stressed out, because I had less than 48 hours to complete the song, and I barely know any Egyptian classical music. But that would have been the natural choice for this week! Luckily I realised that leaning into the spookyness would also do the job. So after arriving home at 2am from a boardgame night, I sat down at the computer and wrote this song while being half asleep already.

The song for week 44 of year 2025.

I love and hate this one. I had already done a completely different song for this week, while I had a light fever and couldn’t program properly. On the day of the page update, I was feeling better again. And just before we wanted to upload the update, Sam showed me the piece about decimal time in the wake of the French revolution. And I had to throw away the prior song (and delay our update by two hours) in order to write a decimalised version of the inaugural worm-blossom.org song. And I made it deliberately awkward, to emphasise the unnaturalness of decimal systems. At this point in time, the site had more music in odd meters than in straightforward ones, so making a rhythmically awkward piece was a bit painful. But also funny!

The song for week 46 of year 2025.

This song was for ufotofu release week, so it had to be a palindrome. Which was a fun learning experience. I wanted to make sure that the palindrome would be rather obvious visually, so the song had to be pretty short. Which is a shame, I really like the sound I got going here.

The song for week 46 of year 2025.

I had two initial plans for this one: I wanted a piece that could sustain comparatively long stretches of silence, and I wanted the warmth of woodwinds. Neither ended up working too well with beepbox, with the sound being much closer to a church organ than to the organic sound of woodwinds that could make the silences work. So I ended up leaning into the organ feeling and abandoned both original plans. It still remained the most “classical” piece up to that point, which was important to me — I do not want to only do quirky chiptune stuff on this site.

The song for week 47 of year 2025.

Okay, this one is plain silly. I was disappointed that Goldbox did not have a flanger effect. So I looked closer at what you can do with modifier tracks, and turns out you can vary the cutoff frequencies of filters over time. So I simply had some fun doing the most ridiculous flanger-like things I could in an hour or so.

The song for week 48 of year 2025.

@Soapdog had absolutely made my day/week by asking me whether it would be possible to do a playlist of the weekly music tracks, to listen to while reading. So not only did that spawn the playlist page you are looking at right now, but I also wanted to make some really nice reading music.

The song for week 49 of year 2025.

Switched to a custom fork of AbyssBox this week, so I was mostly playing around with some new sounds and effects. Any similarities to this piece and this one are purely coincidental.

Some of the noise in here might be jarring to some listeners I suppose? The individual lines are definitely somewhat uncomfortable, but once you know what to expect, and also once they start layering into a blanket of noise, the whole thing turns comfortable again, at least for me. Then again, I also find listening to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum to be comfortable, so...

The song for week 50 of year 2025.

BeepBox and its mods can generate random sound presets. This song started by pressing that button and then writing the first section for the generated preset. Which was all well and good, but when I wanted to add a melody on top, I realised that the whole thing didn't really conform to well-tempered tuning. So for the melody and the bass part, I had to do various pitch shifts of a couple dozen cents in multiple places during the song, and then lent into the fun you can have with that. Surprise, microtonality!