Ambi Encoder Neural Ecology

s3g Ambi Encoder Neural Ecology is a zero-input recurrent-circuit instrument with direct first-through-seventh-order ACN/SN3D output. It grows between four and sixty-four nonlinear nodes, places every active node in a nested spatial structure, and decodes its own Ambisonic field through four or eight virtual directional pickups that learn both what and where to hear. Those ears can also vote on movement through a three-dimensional Field Lattice of up to 128 situations, allowing the Ambisonic field to listen to and compositionally direct itself.

The result is not a neural model, a trained system, or an emulation of a historical device. It extends the signed rings and slow-to-fast recurrent cells shared with Ambi Encoder Pulsar into a spatial ecology: location affects what the circuit hears, and what the circuit hears affects both its sound and its future position.

Workflow

1. Insert s3g Ambi Encoder Neural Ecology on a 64-channel REAPER track, choose a factory state, and select the HOA ORDER.
2. Follow it with an ambisonic decoder.
3. Select a NODE SET from one ring through the complete sixty-four-node field.
4. Use ACTIVITY, SIGMOID, and RING FB to find the edge between dormancy, intermittent firing, sustained oscillation, and saturation.
5. Shape the organism with matrix coupling, hierarchy, phase paths, register, time spread, diversity, Brownian movement, and autonomous drift.
6. Raise FIELD RETURN. Choose the four-direction TETRA 4 or eight-direction CUBE 8 pickup aperture, set PROPAGATION and PICKUP FOCUS, then choose a local, cross-wired, diffuse, or roaming listening topology.
7. Raise PICKUP ADAPT to let the ears steer toward the parts of the living field that affect their connected lobes. PICKUP ANCHOR determines how strongly learned directions return toward the original tetra/cube body.
8. Use AUDITORY PLASTIC to evolve pickup-to-lobe relationships. METABOLISM sets desired lobe activity and ADAPTATION determines how quickly each lobe adjusts its operating bias toward that target.
9. Use CIRCUIT PLASTIC and its rule to evolve internal connections. FREEZE suspends weight, auditory, homeostatic, Brownian, drift, and roaming evolution without stopping recurrent audio.
10. Open the SCORE view and choose one, two, four, or eight planes. Set VARIATION, RECOMBINE, and MEMORY, then press GROW LATTICE. The current living genome becomes the founder and all sixteen to 128 cells are populated in one action.
11. Press STOP and click cells to audition their resident genomes. Use GO to move to the selected cell, or PLAY to resume FIELD, MIDI, or COUPLED traversal. Every move creates one offspring from the source and destination residents.
12. AMOUNT sets how strongly each offspring enters the audible organism, DWELL sets its minimum lifetime before another autonomous move, and TRANSITION sets the gestation/glide time.
13. FOLLOW ACTIVE keeps the visible plane on the active cell. Each plane’s marked OUT point enters the next plane at its marked IN point.
14. SAVE and LOAD preserve the parameters, live genome, complete resident population, generations, ingress/egress locations, birth seed, and traversal trail.
15. Set field and cell width, mobility, rotation, center, air, Doppler, and output gain.

Node Sets and Growth

Changing the node set activates or retires a balanced structural population over a 120 ms transition. New nodes inherit energy from their parent lobe and cluster plus a deterministic seeded disturbance, so increasing the population sounds like growth rather than a hard reload.

Recurrent Circuit

Every cluster contains a signed four-node ring. Node output is fed to its neighbors through direct and first-order allpass paths, filtered by an R-C memory, and passed through a bounded nonlinear response. The four nominal cluster times are 80, 32, 9.5, and 2 ms. REGISTER scales them together, while TIME SPREAD contracts or expands their logarithmic separation.

A signed four-by-four matrix connects the clusters inside each lobe. A second signed matrix connects the four lobes. Slower active clusters gate and drive the faster ones. Each local node has a slightly different bias, ring polarity, pickup-return polarity, and optional nonlinear response, so DIVERSITY moves the network from uniform sigmoid cells toward a heterogeneous circuit without inserting conventional oscillators.

The Field Listens to Itself

Every active node is conditioned and multiplied by its complete spherical-harmonic basis vector. The resulting HOA frame is decoded internally by a selectable directional aperture. TETRA 4 uses four tetrahedral directions. CUBE 8 adds the opposite tetrahedron, producing eight cube-corner directions related to the eight-direction work in Processor Ambi Imprint but used here as live feedback sensors rather than an analysis profile. These are real signal paths: the pickup meters show delayed audio, and a bounded four-by-four or four-by-eight auditory matrix distributes it among the four neural lobes. Bright lines in the field view show positive listening relationships, darker lines show inhibitory relationships, and their width shows connection strength.

PICKUP FOCUS interpolates between the omnidirectional field component and directional HOA decoding. PROPAGATION supplies four or eight slightly different fractional delays, from one sample through 180 ms, and also increases high-frequency loss along the return. FIELD RETURN controls how strongly the matrix output enters the neural equations. Every matrix row is normalized by its absolute connection strength before bounded re-entry. The path is always kept warm, so return automation does not expose an empty delay.

An adaptive auditory body

Each pickup begins at a tetrahedron or cube-corner anchor but owns two bounded steering traits. PICKUP ADAPT controls how quickly these traits learn from the energy distribution of the neural lobe and the field signal being returned through that pickup. Positive auditory relationships steer toward active regions; predominantly inhibitory relationships steer away. PICKUP ANCHOR continuously decays the learned offset toward the original geometry. At zero Adapt the current learned direction remains active but stops learning; it is not erased.

No pickup can move more than 52 degrees from its anchor. A repulsion constraint acts when two ears approach within 32 degrees, preventing the auditory body from collapsing onto one direction. In the field view, the diamond is the current ear, the small square is its anchor, and the connecting line is its learned displacement. These directions generate the actual HOA decoding vectors used by the feedback path.

Because node position changes the HOA field seen by the pickups, width, mobility, rotation, output order, air, and distance can alter the recurrent behavior rather than merely panning a completed mono sound. The feedback is one or more samples delayed and bounded before re-entry.

Field Lattice Score

The Field Lattice can contain one, two, four, or eight planes. Every plane is a four-by-four wrapping sheet of sixteen resident genomes, giving a maximum population of 128. A genome contains the circuit, lobe, auditory, homeostatic, roaming-phase, and pickup-steering traits that can be inherited. Each resident also carries a compact heritable expression for eight primary controls: Activity, Ring Feedback, Matrix, Diversity, Field Return, Pickup Adapt, Field Width, and Mobility.

GROW LATTICE is the complete authoring action. It takes the current live genome and the current eight primary control values as a founder, creates the selected number of planes and their ingress/egress points, then fills the complete volume genealogically. Growth uses a seeded generator, and save/load preserves the resulting population and live-birth seed exactly. Generated residents differ according to Variation and inherit related functional blocks according to Recombine.

The four bars inside each cell are read-only genome signatures, not sliders: C summarizes the circuit matrix, L the lobe matrix, E the ears and auditory body, and P the pickup-direction traits. Their purpose is to make related residents visually legible without exposing 133 gene editors. The eight primary controls provide the more immediately recognizable phenotype. While the score is active, those rows are highlighted in the main toolboxes and an outlined handle shows the resident’s effective value. The normal handle remains the user’s base value and is never overwritten.

Every plane is a wrapping two-dimensional neighborhood with a distinct IN and OUT cell. Reaching OUT adds the vertical dimension: after its normal dwell, playback travels to IN on the next plane. The last plane exits back to the first, making the pages one continuous volume rather than separate score banks. The portal is independent of compass direction, so both TETRA 4 and CUBE 8 can traverse it. After a variable number of local moves, a gentle portal-seeking bias prevents autonomous playback from remaining on one plane indefinitely. FOLLOW ACTIVE automatically changes the visible page during the vertical move.

Field, MIDI, and coupled traversal

In FIELD mode the smoothed absolute energy of each active pickup votes on a neighboring lattice direction after the dwell interval. With TETRA 4, pickup indices address north, east, south, and west. With CUBE 8, the additional pickups address the four diagonal edges. These votes navigate within a plane; an OUT resident then supplies the vertical route independently of the winning pickup.

In MIDI mode, a note-on moves directly: note number modulo four or eight selects a direction and velocity determines transition force. In COUPLED mode, ordinary notes bias the next field decision and high-velocity notes can force the requested edge. MIDI does not supply pitch or excitation to the synthesis circuit; it enters the same navigational language used by the ears.

Live breeding and trail

A move authors exactly one birth. The source resident splits and remains intact. Its child recombines functional trait blocks and the compact primary-control expression with the destination resident, receives bounded mutation, and becomes the audible target. MEMORY then controls how much of that child overwrites the destination resident. The next visit therefore encounters a population changed by its own path. Reproduction is event-based, never repeated for every audio block.

VARIATION sets mutation distance during initial growth and live births. The default setting makes neighboring residents clearly distinct in both hidden genome and visible primary-control expression. RECOMBINE sets how strongly destination traits may enter the source child: at zero the child is a mutated source clone, while higher values admit more complete destination blocks. MEMORY sets population plasticity: at zero births sound but residents remain unchanged; at one the destination becomes the new child.

AMOUNT determines how far the audible organism and its eight expressed primary values move toward each child. At zero traversal and resident memory continue without an audible change. DWELL is the minimum lifespan before the field may choose another edge. TRANSITION is the gestation time over which the living genome and visible effective handles glide toward the child without resetting recurrent node state. STOP cancels autonomous movement; clicking a cell while stopped auditions its resident without breeding. GO requests a reproductive move to the selected cell, and PLAY resumes the last non-Off traversal mode. The recent thirty-two-cell trail records how the population was encountered, not an automation replay.

Plasticity and Intervention

Plasticity operates at control rate on the sparse cluster, lobe, auditory, and pickup-direction traits. Internal CIRCUIT PLASTIC relates node groups to one another. AUDITORY PLASTIC correlates each delayed pickup with each destination lobe, producing a learned offset around the selected listening topology. Pickup Adapt changes the directions used to decode that delayed signal. All adaptations are bounded. This is online circuit evolution driven only by the instrument's own recent state; it is not training against examples.

Homeostasis measures the smoothed absolute activity of every active lobe. METABOLISM maps to a target activity, while ADAPTATION determines the rate at which a bounded per-lobe bias approaches that target. The faint halo around each lobe visualizes this regulatory bias. It operates inside the recurrent equations rather than changing the final output level.

FREEZE suspends circuit and auditory plasticity, pickup steering, homeostasis, Brownian movement, autonomous drift, and roaming topology motion while audio feedback continues. RANDOM chooses a new musically bounded parameter ecology inside the current structural and output choices. Genetic intervention belongs to the lattice: set its three controls and use GROW LATTICE for a new resident population.

Resident genomes

The live genome and every lattice resident contain learned circuit weights, auditory weights, homeostatic biases, roaming phase, and sixteen pickup-steering coordinates. Live breeding uses complete functional rows where possible so an offspring inherits coherent relationships instead of 133 unrelated values. The separate eight-value expression keeps the audible mutation legible through the primary toolboxes. Circuit and auditory plasticity may continue to change the audible organism between births; a later GROW LATTICE can use that evolved state as a new founder.

User presets

SAVE writes the complete parameter set, live genome, every resident genome and generation, ingress/egress locations, birth seed and count, current cell, traversal trail, and preset name to a .s3gne file. LOAD restores that evolutionary state. The default location is ~/Music/s3g/Presets/Ambi Neural Ecology. CLAP project state stores the same material. LOAD supports only the three-dimensional evolutionary-lattice format; score-based project and preset formats are incompatible.

Spatial Field

Four lobes occupy a large tetrahedron. Each lobe contains four tetrahedrally arranged clusters, and every cluster contains four local node positions. Smaller node sets recenter the active structure rather than leaving missing lobes on one side of the sphere.

FIELD WIDTH moves lobe and cluster structure away from the selected center. CELL WIDTH separates the four nodes inside each cluster. MOBILITY derives local rotation, elevation, and radial changes from node, cluster, and auditory-return state. INERTIA smooths complete HOA basis vectors. ROTATION adds a global deterministic rotation while preserving the nested relationships.

Every node has an independent DC blocker and distance-aware air and Doppler path. Active-node energy is normalized by the square root of the current population. Individual HOA channels are never moved or normalized independently.

Order and Routing

The output bus is always 64 channels wide. The selected order activates (order + 1)² ACN/SN3D channels and clears the remainder. The same active-order HOA frame feeds the virtual pickups, so changing order also changes the spatial resolution available to the self-listening circuit.