# montreal friend scale by amon tobin

## The work and its context

montreal friend scale is a 500-edition generative audiovisual series by the electronic musician Amon Tobin, released on Art Blocks on Ethereum mainnet, contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, project ID 320, in the curated category.[^S01][^S06] Each output is a monochrome field of white particles slowly gathering into luminous filaments on a near-black ground, and each is simultaneously a piece of music: narrow bands are filtered out of white noise until pure sine tones from one chosen musical scale remain audible, and every line that appears in the image is a note the viewer can hear.[^S01]

Tobin, born 1972 in Rio de Janeiro and based in Los Angeles, has defined a singular path in electronic music across eight major studio albums and his ISAM audiovisual performances, and he releases music under five aliases through his own Nomark label.[^S06][^S07][^S11] His AB5D dossier, titled "Harmonic emergence from noise to form", reads the series as a translation of his sound practice, "structured emergence", into a visual generative system, and it remains his only Art Blocks project.[^S06] In the Art Blocks interview published three days before the public opening, Tobin told Jeff Davis that the project "came almost entirely from the limitations of the format in terms of bandwidth for sound", and that his answer was to lean into the constraint by "stripping further to the simplest sound there is."[^S07]

The series runs on three.js 0.124.0 at a square aspect ratio with zero external assets, carries the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, and its bundled artist script is 20,184 bytes.[^S01][^S02] The lowercase styling of the title and artist credit is the artist's own, preserved in the registry record.[^S01]

## Conception and development

The conception begins from a fact about sound: white noise contains every possible frequency, so filtering narrow bands out of it can isolate pure tones. The description explains that the bands are limited "to only ever reveal specific notes from a particular musical scale", so each piece is "a unique iteration of this scale with different notes from it gaining prominence", sometimes chordal, sometimes dissonant, "but always beautiful because the scale is beautiful."[^S01] The visual system is the same process made visible: the noise becomes particles, and the particles "congeal into dense lines", one line per audible note.[^S01]

In the interview Tobin frames the work as a study in constraint and emergence: "the foundation is in harmonic rules where chaos gradually conforms to those rules. Noise is gathered in order to make audible tone, and this is represented visually in kind."[^S07] He describes his broader practice as reorganizing sound to make sense of the world, with the creative input stemming from "how I might try to overcome the limitations of a medium", and he notes that sine waves attracted him precisely because pure tones "can be extracted from noise and tuned harmonically through basic subtractive synthesis."[^S07] This was his first fully fledged NFT artwork, after a collaboration on the operator privacy/attempts collection and music NFTs on Catalog.[^S07]

Tobin also warned collectors about the work's tempo and its exceptions: "It's a stubbornly slow reveal in general. The individual pieces will vary in the time they take to materialize and there are some unique occurrences too. A small number of the outputs will stray from the monochrome palette. There's even a chance that a very fleeting mutation will rotate. Quite the reckless maverick!"[^S07] All three claims, the slow reveal, the rare color and the rare rotation, are checkable against the script, and all three check out.[^S02]

## How the work was constructed

The full artist script was retrieved from the official indexed project record at the Art Blocks mainnet GraphQL endpoint, filtered by the exact slug montreal-friend-scale-by-amon-tobin and corroborated against contract 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270 and project ID 320. The retrieved script is a 20,184-byte webpack-style bundle with SHA-256 digest 37263f2eba8cfb296c0d2e79cf1ef977b18043e13773f4fea58859b803bfc72c, and it was read in full across chunked passes and a symbol map.[^S01][^S02]

Randomness comes from a dual sfc32 generator: two instances are seeded with the first and second 32-character halves of the chain hash, warmed up with 500,000 iterations, and then alternated for every draw, a dec() method that flips between the two streams.[^S02] The musical material is a fixed table of nine frequencies from 130.81 Hz to 261.63 Hz, the C minor scale across the C3 to C4 octave; the script selects three to six of them by repeated random splicing, randomly shifts each down or up an octave half the time, and sorts the result ascending.[^S02] The audio engine is pure Web Audio, no samples: a looping white-noise buffer feeds one bandpass filter per chosen note, a gain node ramps from silence with a slow 1.5-second time constant, and an analyser node with an audio worklet drives the visual side.[^S02]

The visuals are a GPU particle system in three.js: positions live in float textures updated by a simulation shader (the bundle includes a GLSL simplex-noise module and a custom "attr" attraction shader that pulls particles toward implicit line segments), and a point shader draws each particle as a small disc whose alpha fades with density.[^S02] Each chosen note owns one attractor line, which is why every audible tone has a visible filament.[^S02] The script sets the cursor to a pointer, consistent with a click-to-start gesture for browser audio policies.[^S02][^S09] The rare mutations the artist promised are present in code: the monochrome default can be overridden by a color roll, and the composition's rotation is either fixed or, for a minority of outputs, set turning.[^S02][^S07] The live renderer confirmed the behaviour on token 320000495: the reported hash matched the chain record, frames captured at 5, 25 and 55 seconds all differed as particles gathered, and the page contains no media elements, only the Web Audio graph.[^S09]

## The mint

The dated record, observed in the current Art Blocks index on September 20, 2026, is unusually compressed.[^S01][^S04] Edition 0 (token 320000000) was minted on June 1, 2022 at 20:04:22 UTC, two days before the project was activated on June 3 at 21:54:26 UTC, a pre-activation artist mint.[^S01][^S04] The registry's sale-start timestamp reads June 8, 2022 at 17:00:00 UTC, the official collection page carries "Released Jun 8, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC", and the public opening was immediate: edition 1 minted at 17:00:14, fourteen seconds in.[^S01][^S03][^S04]

All 500 editions minted within that single session: the series completed on June 8, 2022 at 17:58:21 UTC, fifty-eight minutes and twenty-one seconds after the sale opened.[^S01][^S04] The minted count equals the maximum of 500, and the project is marked complete, locked and active, with the paused flag false.[^S01] The registry's current price field reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout administrative value; no dated June 2022 source inspected here states the original mint price, so the launch price remains unverified.[^S01] The AB5D collection holds exactly one edition, number 495, which happens to be the final mint of the series, acquired at 17:58:21 UTC in the closing second of the sale and held today by wallet 0xdd19308a9731cdecb67e0d80ca6823394208c045.[^S04][^S05]

## Copyright and licensing

The project registry reports the artwork licence label "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0" for montreal friend scale, with the terms URL https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ recorded in the record.[^S01] This essay therefore categorizes the artwork licence as creative-commons, variant CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.[^S01] The CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 deed grants the freedom to Share, copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, under three conditions: Attribution, giving appropriate credit with a link to the licence and an indication of changes; NonCommercial, no use for commercial purposes; and NoDerivatives, no distribution of remixed, transformed or built-upon material. The deed also forbids applying additional legal or technological restrictions.[^S08]

The NoDerivatives condition has a specific weight here: because the work is an audiovisual composition, a screen recording with its sine tones captured is still just a copy, but sampling the audio into a new track would be an adaptation the licence does not permit, a notable boundary for a musician's work in a sampling culture.[^S08] The script carries no licence header or copyright comment of its own, so no code licence is reported for this package; the absence is recorded rather than resolved.[^S02] The registry lists zero external asset dependencies, and the only runtime dependency is the three.js 0.124.0 library declared by the platform itself.[^S01][^S02] Owning a montreal friend scale token conveys no copyright by itself, and no conflicting licence statements were found in the inspected sources. Images in this essay are referenced through canonical Art Blocks token pages and media rather than republished.[^S04]

## Close reading of examples

Five outputs were inspected directly through their platform media, and the header was additionally exercised in the live renderer.[^S09][^S10]

Edition 495 (token 320000495, minted June 8, 2022 at 17:58:21 UTC, the final mint of the series), the AB5D-held header, shows the system at its most lyrical: broad sweeps of particles curve across the dark field like bowed strings, gathering at bright nodes where filaments cross, with a tight cluster flaring near the top edge.[^S04][^S05][^S10] In the live view those sweeps were still assembling themselves a full minute after load, the stubbornly slow reveal the artist promised, the lines thickening as their notes sustained.[^S07][^S09]

Edition 1 (token 320000001, minted fourteen seconds after the sale opened) is the density extreme of the sample: a heavy lattice of brilliant white filaments and two pronounced ring structures, as if several low notes were played together at full volume.[^S04][^S10] The comparison with the header is instructive: same monochrome grammar, opposite settings of density and brightness, which is what "different notes from the scale gaining prominence" looks like when drawn.[^S01][^S10]

Edition 0 (token 320000000, the pre-activation artist mint of June 1, 2022) is sparse and angular, a few thin filaments meeting at sharp corners like a constellation map.[^S04][^S10] Edition 10 (token 320000010) combines one clean ring with crossing diagonal filaments and a bright collision node.[^S04][^S10] Edition 20 (token 320000020) is the sparsest of the sample, two faint diagonal traces and one soft cluster, a near-silent chord made visible.[^S04][^S10]

## Significance and limitations

montreal friend scale is the batch's clearest case of a musician converting a compositional method into a visual one without illustration or decoration: the same subtractive process produces the sound and the image, so the picture is a spectrum analyser with the aesthetics turned up.[^S01][^S02][^S07] It also documents a moment in Art Blocks history when a major recording artist treated the platform's bandwidth constraint as the brief, and it sold out its 500 editions in under an hour.[^S04][^S07]

Unresolved research questions, flagged for review:

- The original mint price at the June 2022 sale is not established by any dated 2022 source inspected here; the current registry price reads 0 ETH, a post-sellout value.[^S01]
- The audio was not auditioned by ear: the Web Audio graph was verified in code and an AudioContext was observed running in a headless browser with autoplay restrictions disabled, but no human listening test was possible; whether a click gesture is required in a normal browser session follows each browser's autoplay policy.[^S02][^S09]
- The color-deviating minority and the rotating mutation were verified in code and described by the artist, but all five sampled outputs were monochrome; the colored variant was not observed directly.[^S02][^S07][^S10]
- The Nomark label page is a Bandcamp-hosted storefront whose dynamic catalogue did not fully render in text extraction; it corroborates the label's existence but was not used for any factual claim beyond that.[^S11]
- The exact musical scale implied by the nine-frequency table (130.81 to 261.63 Hz, matching C minor across C3 to C4) is read from code; the artist names no scale in the inspected sources.[^S02]

[^S01]: Art Blocks. [montreal friend scale by amon tobin: project registry record (projects_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:03Z.
[^S02]: amon tobin. [montreal friend scale full artist script (projects_metadata.script)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:03Z.
[^S03]: Art Blocks. [montreal friend scale: official collection page](https://www.artblocks.io/collection/montreal-friend-scale-by-amon-tobin). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:24:28Z.
[^S04]: Art Blocks. [montreal friend scale token records (tokens_metadata)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:21:52Z.
[^S05]: Art Blocks. [AB5D linked wallet set (user_profiles query)](https://artblocks-mainnet.hasura.app/v1/graphql). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:22:10Z.
[^S06]: AB5D. [amon tobin artist dossier](https://ab5d.xyz/artists/amon-tobin/). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:24:28Z.
[^S07]: Jeff Davis. [In Conversation with Amon Tobin (Art Blocks Artist Insights)](https://www.artblocks.io/info/spectrum/in-conversation-with-amon-tobin). Published 2022-06-05. Accessed 2026-09-20T00:24:28Z.
[^S08]: Creative Commons. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International deed](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:24:01Z.
[^S09]: Art Blocks. [montreal friend scale live renderer, token 320000495](https://generator.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/320000495). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:27:30Z.
[^S10]: Art Blocks. [montreal friend scale static preview media, tokens 320000000/320000001/320000010/320000020/320000495](https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270/320000495.png). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:25:40Z.
[^S11]: Nomark Records. [Nomark Records label site](https://www.nomark.net). Accessed 2026-09-20T00:24:28Z.