# AlgoRhythms by Han x Nicolas Daniel

## The work and its context

AlgoRhythms is a sculpture that doubles as a score. Its coloured columns initially hold a compact isometric arrangement; a click starts a sequence in which individual blocks rise. Han x Nicolas Daniel released the 1,000-work collaboration through Art Blocks Curated in May 2021. The official collection page gives 13 May as the release date, and the fresh project record confirms 1,000 minted against a maximum of 1,000. Its Ethereum project ID is 64 on contract `0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270`; Atlas position 65 is a separate index.[^S01][^S02]

The image and music share more than a token hash. In the artist script, a block receives a note, a colour associated with that note, an octave and a duration related to its subdivision depth. Its movement is triggered by the same scheduled event that triggers the synthesizer. The apparent stack of objects is therefore also an ordered set of events, with each block occupying both space and time.[^S02]

Four official originals were opened during this revision: #0, #1, #10 and the AB5D-held #574. All rendered, and clicking each produced visible movement. Those observations establish more than silent previews could, but the inspection interface supplied screenshots rather than an audible recording. Sound was not heard by this researcher. Musical details below are consequently identified as script findings or published descriptions, not listening impressions.[^S05][^S06][^S07][^S08]

## Conception and development

The collaboration has a recoverable contemporary account. In Jeff Davis's Art Blocks interview, dated 13 May 2021, both artists describe discovering each other's work through their shared interest in cubes. Han had followed Daniel's projects; Daniel had encountered Han's CryptoCubes. They began talking and decided to make something together. Asked about inspiration, Han identified music boxes, while Daniel emphasized sound as a generative possibility often overshadowed by images.[^S04]

That exchange gives the project a more specific starting point than the general description of an audiovisual sculpture. A music box holds a sequence in a physical arrangement and releases it through an action. AlgoRhythms similarly lets an apparently complete object become a performance. This is an interpretation of the documented reference and the observed click response, not evidence that the artists intended to reproduce a particular mechanical instrument.[^S04][^S08]

Han's current project page lists separate visual and musical attributes and explains that clicking starts real-time oscillator sound. The visual categories include solid blocks, tubes, mixed forms and several outline treatments; musical categories include scales, tempo, oscillator waveform and rests. The contemporary interview encouraged collectors to click and discover the melodies, mentioning single-note outputs and a special silence possibility. The inspected sample does not establish which token realizes that silence case.[^S12][^S04]

## How the work was constructed

The full indexed script was independently retrieved and read, rather than reconstructed from trait labels. Its 25,503 UTF-8 bytes produce SHA-256 `da7be0a8086d6f819551368bf9fea798a4b1c267d857728602b52306910fc0ff`. The declared external library is `tone@14.8.15`. Retrieval came from Art Blocks' GraphQL index, without a pinned Ethereum block. The artist program itself handles canvas drawing and geometric projection; Tone supplies the musical scheduling and synthesis interface.[^S02]

Two paths take information from the hash. The script converts its 32 byte pairs into values used to select weighted attributes, including subdivisions, block height, margin, type, style, scale, waveform, tempo and melodic pattern. Separately, an integer parsed from an initial hash slice seeds a xorshift generator. That stream chooses colours, subdivision locations and note assignments. These mechanisms are materially different from saying that the program merely contains the words “Tone” and “oscillator”: they explain how one token fixes both an arrangement and its performance.[^S02]

The main geometric object is recursively divided into four children. Inserted points select which region subdivides, up to depth four. Procedural placement varies the distribution; alternative patterns direct insertions along lines, diagonals, a cross or related arrangements. Each terminal region becomes a block. Margin separates neighbouring blocks, while the type determines whether their tops are solid or hollow. In mixed outputs, the solid-or-hollow choice is made per terminal block.[^S02]

The projection is an explicit calculation from three-dimensional coordinates onto a two-dimensional canvas. Three faces receive different lightness values, creating volume without a 3D engine. Outline styles add edges to those faces. Crucially, Black Outline does not discard their colour: #574 visibly retains blue, yellow and red surfaces. Wireframe is the branch that fills faces with the background colour. Treating all outlines as equivalent would erase an important distinction in both code and appearance.[^S02][^S08]

Notes are assigned by traversing the terminal regions. The procedural melody chooses scale indices through the seeded generator; other patterns derive indices from block coordinates, using row or column position, diagonal relationships or distance from the centre. The first note and the final terminal note are forced to the first scale entry, with the latter also reset to the starting octave. Colour follows the selected note index. Octave choice affects block height, giving pitch register a geometric consequence rather than leaving sound as an unrelated accompaniment.[^S02]

Subdivision depth also controls time. A leaf's duration is expressed in Tone notation, becoming shorter as its depth increases. The traversal accumulates these durations into a sequential score. Rest blocks still consume time, but are omitted from the audible event list and visible block drawing. Thus an apparent gap can have a temporal role. The synthesizer is a polyphonic collection of MonoSynth voices, with the selected oscillator type, specified amplitude and filter envelopes, and a tempo of 60, 90 or 120 beats per minute.[^S02]

Click and touch handlers start playback only when the performance is idle. They resume the audio context, start Tone's transport and reset the movement state. A scheduled note starts its block's upward animation; an easing curve overshoots and settles, while a global vertical offset advances across the score. The program stops the transport after the score and active block transitions finish. A continuing animation-frame loop redraws the canvas, but that does not make the composition an endlessly repeating musical loop. The lowercase `s` key exports a PNG, and resize handling adjusts the canvas. Saving and touch input were identified in code but not tested here.[^S02]

## The mint

The first indexed token, #0, minted at 12:58:18 UTC on 13 May 2021. Invocation #1 followed at 13:04:43, matching the project's recorded `start_datetime`. Activation is later, at 22:14:59. The official release date and contemporary interview both use 13 May, but none of those records alone identifies the exact opening of a public sale. Early token existence must not be converted into proof that anyone could mint at that moment.[^S01][^S02][^S03][^S04]

The sample contains a later cluster: #10 and #20 both have the timestamp 15:00:36 on 14 May. The held #574 minted at 15:30:39, and project completion is indexed at 15:51:51. The difference between the sampled #10 timestamp and completion is 51 minutes and 15 seconds. This is a clearly labelled observed interval, not a verified public sellout duration. No claim is made about how the first tokens were allocated.[^S02][^S03]

The original ETH price was not recovered from the inspected artist statement, interview or exact-token records. Current secondary listings do not answer that question. A transaction reconstruction or an explicit dated offer would be needed to establish the initial price and distinguish it from any later change. The current maximum and minted count establish the completed collection's size, not every historical sale setting.[^S01][^S02]

## Copyright and licensing

The project record reports “NIFTY License” and leaves its licence URL empty. That is a verified label, not a verified adoption of a particular dated text. The NFT License 2.0 text inspected during this research describes limited personal, display and commercial rights subject to conditions; it is a comparison reference here, not proof that every provision applies to AlgoRhythms. The collaborative artists' copyright is not transferred merely by buying a token.[^S02][^S10]

The recommended archive presentation is an attributed noncommercial critical display of the unaltered original, linked to its canonical token. The caption preserves the joint credit and reports the unresolved licence version. This is a transparent display rationale, not a newly asserted permission from the artists. The script's visibility also does not establish an unrestricted software licence.[^S02]

Tone 14.8.15 is separately documented. Its published package includes an MIT licence credited to Yotam Mann, permitting software reuse subject to retention of its notice and terms. That dependency licence does not licence the collaborators' artwork or melody. The inspected package identifies the declared version's terms; the current renderer's delivered library bytes were not independently integrity-matched to it.[^S11]

## Close reading of examples

Edition #0 initially resembles a dense bundle of pipes on a light green field. Pink, blue, pale blue, dark green and nearly black columns form a square diamond in projection. Their hollow mouths give the top surface a second, smaller edge inside each cell. Large openings are surrounded by much smaller ones, making the subdivision hierarchy visible without a diagram. The front sides extend downward in long coloured stripes, so the same structure can be read either as a flat tessellation above or as a row of vertical shafts below. After clicking, an upper green tube rose above its neighbours; a later view showed different blocks raised across the arrangement. The motion changes the previously continuous top plane into a sequence of temporary levels.[^S05]

Edition #1 shares the hollow construction but occupies a red-pink field. Its greens, blues, yellow and pale pink are crowded together without conspicuous gaps. Wider blue and red sections near the front interrupt the finer cells above. The initial top face is comparatively orderly even though the lower ends differ in height. Clicking again separates individual components through vertical movement. This comparison shows why a static view is incomplete: it presents a unified object whose independent parts become more apparent when the score runs.[^S06]

Edition #10 replaces hollow mouths with solid tops and introduces pronounced spacing on a deep red ground. Thin posts coexist with broader blocks, and the background remains visible between them. The result reads less like one continuous roof and more like an open field of upright objects. The first click visibly lifted a slender rear column; later frames showed a changing set of raised blocks. A second click during that run did not visibly reset the arrangement, consistent with the script's guard against restarting an active performance. A later check found the initial arrangement restored, and another click raised the rear column again, verifying replay after completion. Its tempo and waveform remain code-derived parameters, not audible qualities established by these screenshots.[^S02][^S07]

The held #574 offers the strongest stylistic contrast. Blue, pale yellow and red faces are bounded by black lines against a dark green field. Broad squares and small clusters coexist, with a large pale central region anchoring the top. The outlines make subdivision boundaries unusually explicit, but the surfaces remain fully coloured. After activation, a blue rear block rose first; subsequent observations showed a stepped arrangement spreading through the structure. The same movement is easier to track here because the black edges articulate the separate volumes. Fresh exact-token ownership places #574 at `0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045`, one of the three accounts in the freshly inspected AB5D profile.[^S03][^S08][^S09]

## Significance and limitations

AlgoRhythms gives its spatial subdivisions musical consequences. Colour identifies note classes, octave selection affects height, and subdivision depth shapes duration. Clicking reveals those relationships through an ordered movement of blocks. The sculpture is therefore not simply an illustration placed beside a soundtrack: its visible units are also units of the score. That distinction is established by the complete script and supported by the observed changes in all four originals.[^S02][^S05][^S06][^S07][^S08]

The contemporary interview supplies a documented music-box reference and preserves both artists' contributions to the idea. The analysis can connect that reference to the working interaction without inventing a division of labour between the collaborators. Its principal remaining experiential limit is auditory: the research verified triggered visual performance but did not hear the generated sound.[^S04]

Unresolved questions

- What were the exact advertised public opening and original mint price?
- What listening observations can be added from an audible playback session?
- Which NIFTY licence version did the collaborators adopt?
- What separate terms govern redistribution of the artist script?
- Which minted output realizes the interview's silence possibility?

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [AlgoRhythms by Han x Nicolas Daniel](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/algorhythms-by-han-x-nicolas-daniel). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S02]: Art Blocks. [Project64 metadata and complete artist script](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S03]: Art Blocks. [AlgoRhythms exact-contract token observations](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S04]: Jeff Davis / Art Blocks. [In Conversation with Han and Nicolas Daniel](https://beta.cent.co/artblocks/+8lneai). Published 2021-05-13. Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S05]: Han x Nicolas Daniel / Art Blocks. [AlgoRhythms #0 original renderer](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/64000000). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S06]: Han x Nicolas Daniel / Art Blocks. [AlgoRhythms #1 original renderer](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/64000001). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S07]: Han x Nicolas Daniel / Art Blocks. [AlgoRhythms #10 original renderer](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/64000010). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S08]: Han x Nicolas Daniel / Art Blocks. [AlgoRhythms #574 original renderer](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/64000574). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S09]: Art Blocks. [AB5D complete linked-wallet profile](https://www.artblocks.io/profile/ab5d). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S10]: Dapper Labs. [NFT License2.0](https://www.nftlicense.org/). Published 2018-11-05. Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S11]: Yotam Mann. [Tone14.8.15 MIT licence](https://unpkg.com/tone@14.8.15/LICENSE.md). Accessed 2026-09-18.
[^S12]: Han Saglam. [AlgoRhythms](https://han.io/works/algorhythms). Accessed 2026-09-18.