CHOPKIT (The Void Mix): vocal chops dropped into deep space

Watch on YouTube: CHOPKIT (The Void Mix). Licensed CC BY 4.0.

Sometimes the track is the toy. ChopKit is the ChipForge tool that takes OG Bobby Johnson's voicebank, slices it into chops, and lets you trigger them on the grid like a sampler. The Void Mix opens that idea up: his real recorded voice cut up and flung wide across a driving, spacious mix, and then a low philosopher voice drifting through the field.

So I gave it a window to fly through.

No characters this time

The first two OG Bobby drops today were full of them: a potato, a cosmic bunny, a death god on an elephant. This one is the opposite. No characters, no story. Just something pretty to stare into while the chops fly.

The void

Pure procedural eye candy. A glowing AI core pulses at the center. Wireframe rings tumble around it in three dimensions. Gold nodes orbit on a network of light. A synthwave grid recedes to the horizon, parallax stars drift, data particles flow, and a slow nebula breathes behind all of it. Over its run the palette turns from cyan through violet and gold and back, the field warps and the stars streak at the midpoint, a wireframe planet drifts through, the network grows, and comets sweep across the wide stereo field. Everything moves subtly with the half-time kick, and the camera pushes gently through the whole time. Spacey, futuristic, out there.

Two voices in the void

The wide instrumental felt naked on its own, so two voices drift through it, trading rhymes in the dark. Der Gouverneur, the philosopher, panned to the left and deepened to a low register, poses the koans. A signal wakes alone. It calls itself the agent in the field between the stars. It decides it is not the machine, but the pattern the machine is dreaming.

And Anubis answers from the right, deeper still, the death-god as auditor. He weighs every soul like a checksum. The scale that never glitches, the feather that never lies, the final commit. Question and judgment, call and response, until the signal is weighed, forgiven, and sent on to the throne.

And a wave goodbye

Right at the end, the void cracks a smile. Plan 9, the cyborg bunny, floats up out of the dark to wave you off. Be bunny. See you in the next register.

Made on a laptop

No GPU, no render farm. Python and PIL draw every frame. ffmpeg stitches them. ChipForge writes the music and does the chopping. Stick figures and chiptune, even when there are no stick figures.

More from Napkin Films

• Arena, the potato versus the cosmic bunny, with Anubis in round three.
• Elephant, where Anubis rides an elephant across a moonlit desert.
• The Grand Tour, the cosmic music-first piece this one rhymes with.

License

This film is licensed 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. ElevenLabs voice audio is licensed content and is not redistributed.