This is a song.

It's made of six stems.
Each one is a single part of it.

A stem is one part of a recording, exported on its own: the bass, the drums, the voice. Play all six together and you hear the song. Press play on any of them to hear it alone.

Every waveform is the stem's real audio.

Each image is drawn from 500 measurements of its stem's loudness, from start to finish. Nothing is generated, smoothed or decorative. Where a stem is silent, its line is flat. A song token is drawn in white from the whole song.

Stems have twelve kinds.
Each kind has its own colour.

It begins unrevealed.

The mint gave out unrevealed tokens. Revealing one burns it and gives you one stem, chosen at random from all 331. You don't know which song or which part until you reveal. The mint has closed, but thousands of unrevealed tokens are still out there, and they can be revealed at any time.

Stems from the same song
can be forged together.

Forging burns the tokens you put in and creates one token that holds them all. A partial set is a token too, and it can be traded. Forging can't be undone.

From one stem to a song.

Each forge adds stems to one token. When the last stem goes in, that token is the song token: six of six stems is the song. Blue takes six. The most any song takes is nine.

Songs from the same album
can be forged into the album.

000 takes 11 songs. O takes 16. 111 takes 22.
The largest piece in the collection is 111: twenty-two songs, made from all 148 of its stems.

Three albums.

Forty-nine songs.
Each one drawn by its stems.

Each ring is a song, read clockwise from the top: its first second to its last. Every stem is a band of colour, stacked outward, as thick as the stem is loud. The colours come from the song's key and the sound of each stem. Click a song to listen.