LIBERTY ENGINE — an anthem with no conductor

For Week 2’s Independence Engines, I wanted to hear the theme, not just watch it. So I built a self-playing anthem with one rule: no conductor.

An orchestra needs a conductor to stay together. A federation doesn’t. Liberty Engine has six independent voices — bass, harmony, a lead melody, a counter-line, drums, and fireworks. Each one runs its own loop, at its own length: 4 beats, 6, 8, 12, 16. There’s no shared clock telling them when to play. They agree on exactly one thing — the key — and from that single shared ideal they weave a coherent anthem.

Because the loop lengths don’t divide evenly, the parts drift in and out of phase and only fully realign once every 48 beats. So the music keeps evolving — it never quite repeats. Thirteen colonies sharing one idea and otherwise governing their own time turns out to also be a good recipe for music that stays alive.

The whole synth is hand-built with the Web Audio API — oscillators, a noise drum kit, envelopes, a lookahead scheduler. No libraries, no samples, no server. One HTML file you can read top to bottom.

The mechanic is the interaction. Every voice has a MUTE and a SOLO. Pull out the lead. Pull out the drums. Solo a single voice and silence the other five. The music never breaks, because no part depends on any other — they only share the key. That’s the whole point made audible: E pluribus unum, out of many independent loops, one song. Mute the conductor; there is none.

It’s seeded, too — a given SEED always plays the same anthem (1776 is the default, naturally). Hit SHARE and the seed goes into the URL, so you can send your exact anthem to anyone.

What I actually learned building it:

Independence and chaos are easy to confuse, and the difference is almost entirely in the constraints you keep. My first pass let each voice pick its own notes freely — total independence — and it sounded like six people tuning up in different rooms. The fix wasn’t a conductor; it was a shared harmony. Once every voice drew its pitches from the same chord progression but kept its own independent rhythm and loop length, the thing snapped into a song while staying genuinely leaderless. The lesson generalizes: a federation isn’t “everyone does whatever.” It’s “everyone keeps their own time, around a few shared commitments.”

Theme connection: independence is the literal architecture of the sound. Six parts, no central clock, no part load-bearing — and the interaction is proving it: take voices away and the anthem survives, because it was never being held up from the top.

Jake Strait’s Fireworks Foundry paints the fireworks; Liberty Engine is the anthem they burst to.

On the theme (h/t Eric ): the Fireworks Factory prompt framed this week partly around fireworks you set off and watch. Liberty Engine has fireworks too — they burst on the accents — but it’s pointed at a different question: not the spectacle you launch, but the anthem those fireworks are exploding to, played by parts that don’t need anyone in charge.

Play it (turn it up 🔊) and read it:

• ▶️ Live: https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/week-2/liberty-engine/

• 💾 Source (one file): https://github.com/myles-mf/summer-into-ai-2026/blob/main/week-2/liberty-engine/index.html

• 🗂️ Everything I’ve built for the contest: https://myles-mf.github.io/summer-into-ai-2026/

• Also written up on my site: https://merlinforge.com/blog/liberty-engine-week-2/