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The Accelerando Illusion is an example of a new musical illusion implying an endlessly rising tempo. Find a steady whole-note and follow as it morphs into a half-note pulse, then quarter-notes, eighth-notes, and so on ...yet the music sounds the same as it did when you started! Drawing inspiration from a Risset Rhythm, in my illusion the tempo similarly increases over time until reaching double the initial rate, at which point it suddenly halves and begins to rise all over again. The main difference is that where a Risset Rhythm lowers the volume of off-beats as the tempo rises, here the probability of those sounds being heard is lowered instead. Layering multiple parts derived by this Chance music technique produces a kind of never-ending forward momentum. The pattern-seeking brain of the listener seeks order and starts to invent its own out of the randomness. There are sixty-four tempo doublings, a reference to the fabled story about grains of rice on a chessboard, often used as a demonstration of exponential growth. Starting at a moderate 115 bpm, The Accelerando Illusion finally fades out at a tempo somewhere in the region of 10 quintrillion bpm! Start slowly if you try to clap along! The Accelerando Illusion by James Crocker
