Maxwell Neely-Cohen sketched a few drum machines in 2019, then shelved them for six years. When he finally started coding in 2025, what came out wasn't one instrument but an ever-expanding collection: 10,000 Drum Machines. The site currently hosts over forty browser-based drum machines, each a standalone experiment. One generates beats from USGS real-time earthquake data—different seismic distributions each day yield different rhythmic densities and impacts. One runs on De Bruijn sequences. One uses logic gates (AND, OR, XOR) to switch instruments. One uses images of cats. One is called the "Extremely Long Term Drum Machine." In every case, the source material is not music. The sound is what remains after some non-musical data or logic has been forced through a step sequencer's grid.

This is the core structure of the remainder. Each machine's input—earthquake data, Boolean operations, pixel information—has its own purpose and context, none of which involves rhythm. When this data is forced into the cells of a step sequencer, its original meaning is stripped away, but the data's own topology—its density, periodicity, ruptures—leaves traces in the resulting rhythm. Those traces are the remainder. They are not seismology, not music theory, not an auditory version of data visualization. They are the part of the data that cannot be fully digested in the translation to rhythm—the residue that survives the lossy migration from one frame to another.

More importantly, the project's own structure embodies remainder-production. "10,000" is not a real goal—it is a horizon. With roughly forty machines built, more than 9,950 remain. The project is structurally designed never to be complete; it is an apparatus for continuous remainder accumulation. Each contributor brings their own non-musical data and idiosyncratic logic, generates a new machine, and adds it to the growing pile. Neely-Cohen himself is explicit about the philosophy: "In this era of massive web-scraping and slop production, I do like the idea of trying to saturate the web with esoteric musical instruments." This is not a gestural manifesto against the algorithm. It is a practice: filling web space with concrete, handmade, unscrapable micro-tools. Each drum machine is too weird, too specific, too unprofitable to be recycled by any content farm. They simply sit on the internet, alive, as remainders of the internet itself.

The project is currently in the chisel phase of the chisel-construct cycle. It has already moved from pure web presence into physical space—Neely-Cohen and collaborator Jessie Char staged "Ground Loops" at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, turning these machines into live installations and performances. CDM, Adafruit, and kottke.org have all covered it. But the art world has not yet given it a name. It is not "sound art"—no sound art curator would fold a cat-image-driven browser drum machine into their exhibition narrative. It is not "net art"—the machines are too functional, each one genuinely playable. It is not "data sonification"—it does not care about faithful representation. It is not "open-source tooling"—it is too absurd. It sits wedged between these categories, still unnamed. This is exactly when to see it: in two years, when the collection swells to three hundred or five hundred machines, when more curators take notice, some framework may absorb it and render it construct. But right now, it is still remainder.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics