BUNNY MANDALA: a six-voice canon of Aum mani padme hum sits over Satie and Pachelbel, while Plan 9 raps a Sanskrit space poem
A 3:29 Plan 9 meditation. Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1 and Pachelbel's Canon in D fused into peaceful trance, while a six-voice canon chants the sacred Tibetan mantra Aum mani padme hum, entering one by one like Row Row Row Your Boat until all six lock in unison. Plan 9 raps an original Sanskrit space poem over the top. Geometric lotus mandala in eight chakra palettes, lattice of tiny bunnies orbiting the center, the Plan 9 bunny holding the breakdown with eye contact and a periodic blink. Five-limit just intonation in D so every pure 3:2 fifth and 5:4 third locks against the drone. Nine ChipForge channels, six ElevenLabs voices plus OpenAI Coral, all autotuned to a D-major mantra melody, cathedral-reverb mixed. CC BY 4.0.
BUNNY MANDALA: a six-voice canon of Aum mani padme hum sits over Satie and Pachelbel, while Plan 9 raps a Sanskrit space poem
Watch on YouTube. A 3:29 Plan 9 meditation. Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1 (1888) and Pachelbel's Canon in D (~1680) fuse into peaceful trance, a six-voice canon chants Aum mani padme hum on top, and Plan 9 raps an original Sanskrit space poem above that. The mandala breathes, rotates, and slowly evolves around the still center. The bunny holds the breakdown. Eyes meet yours.
This one is licensed CC BY 4.0. Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is GPL-3.0-or-later.
The premise
Two public-domain compositions, both in D major, share a harmonic skeleton: Satie's stepwise modal melody from the Gymnopedie sits perfectly on top of Pachelbel's repeating ground bass (D, A, Bm, F#m, G, D, G, A). The film fuses them at 110 BPM as the foundation of a slow trance, then layers a sacred chant on top. The chant is the heart of the piece. The film closes with a soft Sanskrit goodnight. Shubh raatri, namaste.
The sacred mantra
Six voices, each cached and autotuned, enter one by one in canon style, like Row Row Row Your Boat, starting at bar 5 (about 11 seconds in, while the music is still mostly the Surreal Bowl drone). A new voice joins every four bars (8.7 seconds). All six are stacked in unison by about 55 seconds in, and they chant together through the Pachelbel ground, the Riser, both drops, the breakdown, and the Return.
voice 1 bar 5 og_glenda_bunny Plan 9 lead
voice 2 bar 9 bunny_oracle Plan 9 sage
voice 3 bar 13 narrator_warm Bella
voice 4 bar 17 child_curious Gigi
voice 5 bar 21 elder_wise Adam
voice 6 bar 25 performer_coral OpenAI Coral
Each voice says "Aum, Mah-nee, Pud-may, Hoom" with the same phonetic transliteration, tuned for English-trained TTS so the Sanskrit reads authentic. Then autotune_voice.py pitch-locks each clip to the same four-note D-major mantra melody:
Aum D3 root, deep opening
Mah-ni A3 perfect fifth
Pad-me F#3 major third
Hoom D3 root, resolve
D3 (146 Hz) is chest register. The first pass was at D5 (587 Hz) and sounded like chipmunks. Dropping two octaves put the voices in their natural ranges, so the autotune barely shifts the source. Real chanting register, the way Tibetan monks actually sing.
The mix has a multi-tap cathedral reverb (60/150/320/640 ms taps with damped feedback), a long fade-in per voice (six seconds of bloom), light stereo spread across the six voices, and a master volume swell that rises from 0.35 at first entry to 1.0 once all six are stacked.
Plan 9 raps a Sanskrit space poem
Above the canon, Plan 9 narrates an original Sanskrit space poem in mantra-rap cadence. The same og_glenda_bunny voice that says "Shubh raatri, namaste" at the very end is on this layer too, speaking clearly without autotune, the natural Plan 9 voice. Two full passes through the song so the refrain hook lands across both halves.
The refrain is the mantra itself:
Aum, Aum, Aum mani padme hum.
Verses between the hook evoke cosmic emptiness:
Akasha yaatri, kosha-traya yaatri.
Sthoolam, sookshmam, kaaranam.
Nakshatra mandala, chandra deva.
Anantam vyoma, anantam shoonyam.
Vocabulary key: akasha (boundless ether), gaganam (firmament), yaatri (traveler), kosha-traya (the three sheaths of being, gross / subtle / causal), nakshatra mandala (the constellation circle), chandra deva (moon-god), anantam vyoma (infinite sky), shoonyataa-sindhu (ocean of emptiness), kamala chetana (lotus-consciousness), brahma sootram (the cosmic thread), antara jyotih (inner light), taara-loka (the star-world), adi madhya anta (beginning, middle, end). Plan 9 is the vyom yaatri, the sky-traveler.
The Plan 9 voice is processed with a cosmic-cathedral chain: highpass at 90 Hz, lowpass at 5500 Hz, a 2:1 compressor with +2 dB makeup, four-tap aecho (120/320/680/1400 ms taps from short room to long hall), a subtle aphaser for stereo bloom, and a 25 ms Haas delay on the right channel for cosmic stereo width.
Nine ChipForge channels
Through-composed in D major, BPM 110 constant, 96 bars across 8 patterns. Voices assigned through the ADR-026 behavioral grammar (intent before instrument):
| Channel | Role |
|---|---|
| KICK | kick_deep four-on-floor with sidechain trigger |
| SNARE | noise_clap backbeat with riser fills |
| HAT | hat_crisp 8th-notes with wobble panning |
| BASS | sine_bass on the Pachelbel ground, glide between roots |
| DRONE | organ_warm pedal D2, fermata, long-tail reverb (CathedralDecay) |
| LEAD | custom mandala_lead carries the Gymnopedie with 16th-note elaboration, sustain 0.85, release 1.30, glide 40ms (HeroLead) |
| PAD | custom mandala_pad with slow LFO filter breathing, chord stabs on beats 1 and 3 in the drops, vocal_ah doubling (CelestialPulse) |
| ARP | pluck_mellow arpeggio pivoting toward the lead's anchor notes |
| BELL | fm_bell tolls D4 every 2 bars with damped reverb |
Pure intonation, hard-won
The v3 score used Pythagorean tuning on the atmospheric sections, intended for purer 3:2 fifths. The problem: Pythagorean major thirds (F# = 81/64, 408 cents) clashed with the natural 10th harmonic of the sustained D2 drone (just M3 = 5/4, 386 cents). The two F#s landed about 21 cents apart and beat at 9 Hz. The result was an audible warble starting at :42, peaking at :47, and continuing whenever the lead touched F# over the drone. The v4 pass reverted to 5-limit just intonation across every section. F# now sits at 733 Hz, exactly the natural 10th harmonic of the drone. Beat-free.
The v5 pass found one more wobble source: the supersaw detune layers on the mandala_lead (plus or minus 7 cents) and mandala_pad (minus 10 cents) were producing slow 2 to 5 Hz beats between layers on sustained notes. Zeroed both. The piece is clean because clean is the aesthetic.
Visual stack
Python plus PIL polar geometry, 854x480 at 12 fps, 2512 frames. Six concentric rings turn at different rates: outer lotus petals (1.0x scale), mid teardrops counter-rotating, triangle flares, an inner dot ring, plus two rings of tiny Plan 9 bunny silhouettes orbiting like a mandala lattice of bunnies. The bunny rings replace the v3 star gems. Eight chakra-inspired palettes (indigo silver, emerald gold, turquoise magenta, violet electric, full rainbow, warm pink, silver white, indigo fade) crossfade at section boundaries.
Sparkle particles emanate continuously from the center; about 22% of them are tiny bunny heads sparkling outward instead of dots. In the breakdown, the Plan 9 bunny rises to full alpha at the center with the contemplative expression, look_preset="center" for eye contact, micro pupil drift for living gaze, and a periodic blink every 4.5 seconds.
The bookend
The film ships with a 4-second NAPKIN FILMS intro card scored with an ascending D-major sine-bell arpeggio (D5 to F#5 to A5 to D6), much softer than the cricket synth used in earlier productions. The 7-second outro card layers a descending D-major bell tail under Plan 9 saying "Shubh raatri. Namaste." in soft Sanskrit. The Devanagari script appears on the card alongside the transliteration.
Production passes
v1 first cut, original Pythagorean tuning
v2 visual iteration
v3 showcase, but audible Pythagorean dissonance against the drone
v4 tuning fix 1: pythagorean -> just intonation
v5 tuning fix 2: zero supersaw detune on lead and pad
visual: tiny bunny lattice rings + particle bunnies + bunny blink
bookend: D-major bell intro + Sanskrit "Shubh raatri" outro
v6 added six-voice canon of Aum mani padme hum (D5, too high)
v7 dropped the canon to D3 chest register, slow build from bar 5
v8 added autotuned Plan 9 mantra narration loop layer
v9 added Plan 9 clear-voice Sanskrit space poem in mantra-rap cadence
SHIP
Stack
Python 3.13. PIL. ffmpeg. ChipForge for the music with 168 instrument presets and the FilterEnvelope multi-layer synthesis. ElevenLabs and OpenAI for the voices. rubberband for the autotune. Per-pass versioned archive convention at output/films/<scene>/v<N>.mp4, never overwrite. Engine and song scripts are open source at OrganicArtsLLC.
License
Film: CC BY 4.0. Remix it, repost it, drop it into your own thing. Credit "Napkin Films / Organic Arts LLC" and link CC BY 4.0.
Engine code (Napkin Films, ChipForge) is GPL-3.0-or-later.
Source compositions: "Gymnopedie No. 1" by Erik Satie (1888) and "Canon in D" by Johann Pachelbel (~1680). Both works are in the public domain. The ChipForge arrangement is original and licensed CC BY 4.0.
ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed in source form.
Related films
- Cantus Rave: Pärt's canon transformed into festival DnB, same demoscene-cracktro lineage.
- Bunny in the Cloud: Plan 9 voyages through a galactic Factorio cloud.
- Bunny Run: Plan 9 the cyborg bunny runs from his own mortality.
- Out of the Cradle: Holst's Jupiter as Plan 9 space-destiny rap.
Aum mani padme hum.