McLean's lens frames musical pattern as repetition, symmetry, interference, and deviation

McLean offers a lens for reasoning about code-as-pattern in music along four axes: repetition (the foundation of groove and hypnosis in rave music); symmetry (reflection and rotation of material); interference (overlapping patterns producing an emergent composite - like striped warp and weft threads yielding a star pattern in weaving); and deviation (playing with the listener’s expectation, the sweet anticipation and its breaking, which appears in code as random numbers). These four are facets of one framework, giving a composer/programmer a vocabulary for what their code is doing musically, beyond note-by-note production. They are not a checklist of separate techniques but a way of seeing pattern.

Examples

In TidalCycles: repetition = a looped pattern; symmetry = rev or rot; interference = off (1/4) creating an overlapping canon; deviation = sometimes (|+ n 2) for random transposition.

Assessment

For each of the four axes (repetition, symmetry, interference, deviation), give one Tidal or pseudocode example and explain the musical effect it produces.