PLN: "dont render 2h for now lol render 20x different presets 30s clips then let
me watch/listen/grade through. try to do sth gtreat soundreactive". Right call —
19 clips of 30 s is ~10 minutes of realtime capture against 2h25m for the record,
so the taste decision gets made on cheap evidence.
Also recorded: "slopmotion gave me rights to all packs, we can use any, lets be
free and test stuf". Every local pack is fair game, which is worth writing down
precisely because it is the opposite of the sample-bank situation next door.
## Experiment design
Every clip renders the SAME 30 s window. With the audio fixed, the only variable
is the look, so the grades mean something; vary two things and a favourite tells
you nothing about why. 18 packs get one clip each at one reactive baseline, and
clip 19 is `parvagues` again with reactivity OFF. That control earns its slot —
"do something great soundreactive" is unanswerable from 19 all-reactive clips,
because nothing shows what the reactivity contributes. parvagues sorts first as
PLN's own imagery; the control sorts last so it is graded next to its twin.
The reactive baseline is four FX chosen to read differently on a transient —
glitch and rgbDelay snap, liquix flows, slowmo pulls time — since under
`--triggerHeavy` each becomes kick-synced. Four subtle washes would hide the
exact thing being evaluated.
## The window, and a metric that was measuring the wrong thing
Reactivity feeds on onsets, so I scored 30 s windows by summed positive spectral
flux normalised by level. It picked 69:18 at -23.3 dB — the near-silent seam
between Vague de CRIME and REVOLUTION, i.e. PLN's 2 s rest plus a reverb tail.
Dividing by the window mean rewards silence: a quiet window with any activity at
all beats a loud groove. Using the level-gated answer instead — 1:34, -10.1 dB,
inside the techno opener, four-on-the-floor — which is the honest test for
kick-synced triggers. Same shape as ranking orbits by level instead of punch.
Two preflight checks that exist because of what they would have cost: a pack
needs BOTH local loops and a `videoLibrary.json` row (the renderer picks its
backdrop from the library, so a pack with 30 files and no row fails at clip 12,
after eleven realtime renders), and dead symlinks into Kevin's own machine are
skipped rather than attempted.
The grading page follows judge.html and bounds.html: local, not an Artifact,
because 20 clips is hundreds of megabytes and the viewer sandbox blocks a
page-initiated download — and the grades have to come back as a file.
