Polyphony is my attempt to make code feel like a hand on a canvas.

In music, polyphony is many independent voices sounding at once, separate lines that each hold their shape while making something whole. That's the idea I built this around. Each piece runs on six brush systems I wrote from scratch: watercolour that bleeds, dry brush that drags, spray that splatters, alongside pencil, stipple, and pointillist marks, each with its own physics for how the brush meets the canvas. They all paint together, across four stacked surfaces, in the order I'd work by hand: foundation first, then the primary strokes, then the fine marks and blooms on top.

Colour isn't my call, it's the system's. Every fill gets scored for vibrancy and checked against its neighbours, then the whole composition is balanced warm against cool. Five structures set the architecture: radial, diagonal, centred, balanced, and chaotic. A wildcard rule lets a handful of marks break formation, so nothing resolves too neatly.

Up close is where it really happens. From far away a piece looks like one image, but get near it and it comes apart, you can see where one brush bled into another, little bits of texture and colour that only happened because all six systems were running at once.

And it isn't just randomness deciding. It's how the systems combine, a radial piece in watercolour with a grey palette is nothing like a chaotic one in dry brush and neon. Those combinations run into the tens of thousands, and that's before the randomness inside each piece even starts. Some settle into quiet washes, others come out dense and full of friction, and I never know which until it runs. That not-knowing is the part I like most.