Raphaël Maurice Forment is a French musician and doctor of musicology who defended his PhD on live coding aesthetics and techniques at the Jean Monnet University of Saint-Etienne in 2025. Active within the TOPLAP collective and the Paris-based Cookie Collective, performing under the name BuboBubo, his latest creation is Cagire ��� a step sequencer built on the Forth programming language. This is a deeply unusual choice. Forth was invented in 1970 by Charles Moore to control radio telescopes. It uses reverse Polish notation, has almost no syntax. Just a stack, words, and numbers.

Cagire's core mechanism is disarmingly simple: a standard step sequencer grid, but instead of notes, each step contains a Forth script. When the sequencer reaches a step, it executes the code. That code can do anything — produce sound, trigger samples, apply effects, invoke randomness, or do nothing at all. Music is not "written" here; it is what remains after code executes — it is remainder. Playing a middle C in Cagire looks like this: c4 note sine sound 2 decay . — five words pushed onto a stack, a final dot that triggers sound. It doesn't feel like programming. It feels like juggling with words.

From an SAE aesthetics perspective, there are three chisel-construct cycles operating simultaneously. First: the history of programming languages is itself a chisel-construct process — from machine code to assembly to C to Java to Python, each step adds abstraction layers atop the previous construct. Forth is the remainder that this process forgot. It settled into its form in the 1970s and has barely evolved since, because it was already minimal: stack plus words. Choosing Forth for music is to excavate a geological deposit that has been overlooked for fifty years. Second: the step sequencer is the construct of electronic music — the TR-808, TR-909 established the paradigm of grid-equals-note. Cagire chisels this paradigm: it replaces "note" with "arbitrary code." The grid remains, but the nature of what it contains has fundamentally changed. Third: Forment's own tool-making trajectory is a continuous chisel operation — Sardine (Python, 2022, rich and heavy) → Topos (TypeScript, browser-based, lighter) → Sova (polyglot, more flexible) → Cagire (Forth, absolute minimum). Each new tool chisels away more from the previous one. Cagire is the remainder of this sequence of reductions.

Stranger still, Cagire runs as a VST3 and CLAP plugin inside commercial host software (Ableton Live, Bitwig, etc.). A Forth interpreter embedded inside the construct-infrastructure of professional music production — this is structurally absurd, a remainder parasitizing the construct from within. It integrates Ableton Link for network synchronization, ships with a complete built-in synthesis engine called Doux (no external software required), and supports 32 banks of 32 patterns of up to 1024 steps each — theoretically over a million Forth script slots. But this scale of possibility is manageable precisely because of Forth's minimalism: each step can be a single line of code.

Seeing Cagire now matters more than seeing it later, because it currently occupies a position that has no name. It is not traditional live coding (no continuous code stream, but discrete script-grid). It is not a traditional sequencer (code inside, not notes). It is not a traditional programming environment (it is an instrument, meant for improvisation). It is not a traditional Forth application (no embedded systems, just sound). It sits in the gap between live coding, electronic music production, programming language archaeology, and instrument-building — no single community can fully name it. Forment writes in the documentation: "Cagire is not complex, it is just very peculiar." That peculiarity is the signature of a remainder that has not yet been digested into construct.

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