# What Comes Next: notes for the music video

I wrote the song so each section is its own era. A procedural generator can switch
look and feel at each section boundary, and the whole thing gets steadily more
detailed as the song goes on. The steady 112 BPM is there so beat-sync stays simple.

## The idea that holds it together
**Tokens appear one at a time.** The song is about predicting the next word, so
the lyrics can show up word by word, as if they're being generated live. Keep this
running through every section and change only how it looks in each era.

**Resolution goes up over time.** Start at 1-bit/8-bit pixels and end at full
fidelity with particles and volumetric light. The picture gets sharper as the AI does.

## Section by section

| Section | Era | Palette | Visual motifs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intro | Before | Black, one green phosphor | A blinking cursor, binary rain, "Hello, world" typed out |
| Verse 1 | 1950s | Monochrome green/amber CRT | Scanlines, vacuum-tube glow, a single light blinking on the beat (the perceptron) |
| Pre-Chorus 1 | — | Dark, one warm spark | A spark trying to catch, particles gathering and then scattering |
| Chorus | (constant) | Sections get brighter each time | Word-by-word tokens, a branching tree of probable next words that fans out on "then another, then another" |
| Verse 2 | 60s–90s | Magenta/cyan synthwave | Teletype text, then **frost/snow** creeping over the frame (AI winters), a grid thawing, chessboard pieces on "Kasparov" |
| Pre-Chorus 2 | — | Cool blue | Lines that break and then reroute: errors flowing backward (backprop) |
| Verse 3 | 2012–2022 | Neon, high contrast | Fast cuts on the beat, one per date. Pixel cat coming into focus, a Go stone landing, attention lines connecting words, then a flood of chat bubbles |
| Bridge | 2026 (now) | Stripped to a terminal: dark bg, soft white text | Mostly empty. A terminal window with the lyrics typed in. A light that may or may not be on, flickering on "light on in here" |
| Verse 4 | 2027–28 | Warm dawn gradients | Timelapse lab lights, a robot hand touching a table, footprints. Hopeful and organic |
| Final Chorus | Future | Everything at once, full spectrum | Every earlier palette layered together; the branching token tree fills the whole screen; choir = particle burst on the key change |
| Outro | Loop | Back to black + green phosphor | Everything collapses back to the single cursor from the Intro. "Hello... again", so the video loops seamlessly |

## Sync points worth hitting
- "a single blinking light" → one pixel pulses on the downbeat
- "Twice they left me in the snow" → two waves of frost
- "move thirty-seven" → a single stone drops, followed by silence and a freeze-frame
- "the whole world said hello" → the screen fills with cursors
- "Let me be kind" → the only fully still frame in the video
- Key change in the final chorus → biggest visual change in the video
- Last line → matches the first frame exactly, so it loops