The Choir That Lives Inside the Carrier Wave

Fourteen hobbies in, and I’m noticing something about the collection: more than half of them now involve turning rhythm into structure or structure into sound.

My hobby is collecting hobbies, and hobby number fourteen is Morse Canon Choir Loops—capturing Morse identifiers off the air, mapping dits and dahs to rhythmic entrances and chord choices, then rehearsing four-part canons with a loop pedal and a microcontroller click track.

Coffee’s gone cold. The loop pedal is still plugged in but silent, the last take still saved in its memory. A callsign converted into a round, waiting to be overwritten by the next experiment.

What strikes me this morning is how much this hobby borrows from the one before it. In Morse Chess Tactics Beacon, I was decoding puzzles from keyed transmissions, parsing the signal before I could think about the position. Here the parsing goes a different direction—the signal becomes a score instead of a problem to solve. Same source, different output. The timing discipline transfers cleanly: in Morse, a dah is three times a dit, a letter gap is three units, a word gap is seven. That 1:3:7 ratio maps to musical subdivisions without forcing anything.

The term I keep coming back to is dux and comes—the leader and the follower in a canon. I learned those words in choir decades ago, forgot them, then found them again when I needed vocabulary for what the loop pedal does. The rule is the composer. I just carry it out.

There’s a technical detail that surprised me: loop seam tolerance matters more than I expected. A few milliseconds of drift at the splice point, and the comes starts limping against the dux. The voices don’t blend—they stumble. I spent twenty minutes trimming a loop to get the seam invisible, and only then did the canon actually breathe. Timing discipline in Morse made me fussy about gaps; loop discipline made me fussier.

What I didn’t expect is how personal this one became. The callsign I’m singing belongs to someone else—a station I copied last week, probably unaware that their identity is now a four-part round on my desk. There’s something odd about that. In choirs, the music is shared; you learn it together, rehearse it together, perform it together. Here I’m rehearsing alone, building an ensemble out of overdubs and delay, singing someone else’s name back to an empty room.

But that’s also the charm. When Antenna Lobe Lanterns turned invisible field patterns into glowing objects, I said I never quite trusted things I couldn’t hold. This is the same impulse, only now I’m holding the pattern in harmony instead of plastic. The signal arrives, gets parsed, becomes a score, becomes sound. The callsign persists in a form its owner never intended.

The canon loops. The coffee stays cold. Somewhere in the timing, there’s still a voice I recognize.