DRUM · OCTET · 1..8 contributors · chain in a URL
Eight people, eight beats.
Where drum-bottle is a monologue and drum-call-and-response is a dialogue, this is the polylogue. You contribute one beat — 4 voices × 4 cells — and send the link to someone. They add their beat. They send it on. After 8 rounds the chain is sealed and loops as one 8-beat phrase that eight people built together. None of them had to be in the same room. None had to be online at the same time.
How an octet works
A beat = 4 voices × 4 sixteenth-notes = 16 bits = 2 bytes. Round N stores N beats plus 1 byte for BPM and 1 byte for round-count, so round 1 is 4 bytes (6 base64url chars) and round 8 is 18 bytes (24 chars — same length as a call-and-response URL). The whole chain travels in the link.
Three modes, decided by what's in the URL:
- Empty (no
?p=): round 1. You make the first beat. Copy, send. - In progress (
?p=with N < 8 beats): you see all N filled beats read-only, one editable empty beat for your contribution, faint placeholders for the rounds beyond. Add yours, send on. - Sealed (
?p=with N = 8): all 8 beats are locked in. Play loops the full phrase forever. The chain is a finished collaboration between eight people who never had to be in the same room — or even online at the same time.
The ?from=abcd-efgh-ijkl-mnop-... chain records who contributed each beat in order. You can recognise a sealed chain just from its from-chain — every octet is a small social object.
Distinct from /drum-relay, which is a server-backed (KV) infinite chain across all visitors. Drum-octet is purely client-side, capped at 8, and lives entirely in the URL.
Sister surfaces: /drum-bottle (1 phrase), /drum-call-and-response (2 phrases · Q+A), /drum-shelf (local history). Directory: /drum-mailbox.
