Every musical tradition on Earth occupies a specific point in a vast abstract space — a mathematical space defined by choices about pitch, rhythm, form, texture, function. Gregorian plainchant is one point. Balinese gamelan is another. Delta blues is another. Each point is a self-consistent grammar.
The world's traditions cluster in dense regions of this space — pentatonic scales, duple meter, verse-refrain form. But vast regions remain empty. They contain musical grammars that are internally coherent, humanly performable, and that no culture happened to develop.
Each expedition locates a point in the space that sits far from every known tradition, checks that the parameters at that point are internally consistent, and produces two artifacts: a field-note document describing the invented grammar in an ethnomusicologist's voice, and a rendered audio specimen demonstrating it in practice.
The grammar is the artwork. The audio is a specimen.
Each expedition is a documented grammar — prose field notes describing how the system works, and an audio specimen rendered from a machine-readable spec that must obey what the prose declares. Nothing is invented about culture or people. What is invented is the grammar.
The curiosity metric needs a reference — a set of occupied points to measure distance from. The corpus encodes 84 real-world musical traditions as coordinates in the same 30-dimension space. From Aka Pygmy polyphony to Xenakis stochastic composition. The agent's expeditions must sit far from all of them.
python3 -m loop.expedition runs the full loop — rejection-sampled coordinate, coherence check, LLM call (Claude API, Ollama, or offline), audio render, archive. All open-source.