music-video-gen/flow-state/EPIC-4.md

# Epic 4 — the song tells a story

Epic 3 asked what is on screen. This one asks a question none of the existing layers can
answer:

> Why is this the *last* drop rather than the first one?

Nothing in the generator knows. And a viewer who cannot tell the difference is watching a
loop with good production design.

---

## 1. What is actually missing

The generator has four timescales, and `ArcDriver`'s header lists them honestly: per frame,
per shot, per section, whole song. Three of the four are cyclic or local. The fourth — the
"whole song" one — turns out to be much thinner than it reads:

* **`_slowAxisFor`** is the only thing in the system that travels one way across the track.
  It moves one or two params per scene, `journey = smoothstep(t/duration)`, in a direction
  picked by `rng.bool()`. It is real progression, and it is blind: it does not know where the
  drop is, it does not know a section from a boundary, and half the time it travels the wrong
  way for what the song is doing.
* **`paletteArc.underDrift`** — a bounded hue crawl, plus per-*kind* offsets.
* **`buildSlope`** — one bar of lookahead. Local by design.

Everything else that decides what a video looks like is keyed on section **kind**, and kinds
recur:

```
assignRostersByKind()   roster per KIND — every drop cuts between the same visuals
KIND_ENERGY / biasFor() same energy, density, motion for every drop
rhythmFor(energy)       same cutting pattern for every section of that energy
derivePaletteArc()      kindHue.drop — the same hue offset at every drop
frameShot(style, ...)   framing from previous shot + energy; no notion of when
```

So the fourth drop is cast from the same roster as the first, biased to the same energy,
cut at the same rate, tinted the same hue and framed by the same rule. The *content* of the
video is a function of `kind`, and `kind` has no arrow of time in it. That is precisely a
song structure without a story: recurrence without consequence.

This is not a bug in any of those modules. Kind-keying is what gave the video its identity
(§`assignRostersByKind`), and it should stay. What is missing is the second coordinate.

> Today a section is identified by **what kind of thing it is**.
> It should be identified by **what kind of thing it is, and where in the story it sits**.

---

## 2. The proposal, in one paragraph

A new pure module, `look/Story.js`, runs once per track between segmentation and the look
generator. It reads the section list and the summary, picks a **plot** the way
`directors.js` picks a director, locates the song's **key moments**, and emits a small
**narrative state** per section and per frame. Everything that currently keys on `kind`
keys on `(kind, story)` instead. No scene changes, and — in the first slice — no new
uniforms: the story acts by rewriting inputs the whole library already consumes, so it
applies to all 61 scenes on day one.

---

## 3. What a story is, here

Three layers, smallest to largest.

### Position — where a section sits

Derived, not invented. From the sections `segment.js` already produces:

```js
{
  index, kind,
  ordinal, ordinalOf,   // "the 3rd of 4 drops" — the single most useful missing fact
  act,                  // setup | development | turn | climax | resolution
  isMoment,             // one of the key moments below
}
```

`ordinal` alone unlocks most of the devices in §5, and costs a `Map` and a loop.

### Moments — the frames the story turns on

Measured from the track, never imposed. A short list, and each one has a definition that
falls out of data already on the FeatureTrack:

| moment | definition |
|---|---|
| **arrival** | first section whose energy clears 0.6 × max — the video's first "here it is" |
| **turn** | largest energy *fall* between adjacent sections after the arrival |
| **climax** | max-energy section; ties broken toward the later one |
| **resolution** | first section after the climax whose energy stays below it |

A two-section track collapses these onto each other, and that is fine — a track with no
structure gets almost no story, which is the correct behaviour and not a degenerate case
to defend against.

### Plot — what the track does with them

One coherent narrative shape per track, chosen weighted-random with the audio tilting the
odds, exactly the way `pickDirector` works, and for the same reason: a fixed mapping from
measured features to narrative is how a library ends up with one story per genre.

| plot | shape |
|---|---|
| **emergence** | almost nothing, then something. Reveal rises monotonically and stays. |
| **escalation** | each recurrence of a kind is further than the last. A ratchet, not a curve. |
| **collapse** | order → entropy. The climax is a breakdown of the thing, not a peak of it. |
| **return** | ABA. The outro rhymes with the intro, transformed by what happened between. |
| **unveiling** | the protagonist is withheld until the climax and then it is all there is. |

Each plot is a set of curves over five **story variables**, evaluated per frame:

```
tension     0..1   how hard everything is pushed
reveal      0..1   how much of the song's identity has been shown
closeness   0..1   wide and distant → close and involved
population  0..1   sparse → crowded → alone
order       0..1   regular → broken (or the reverse; the plot decides the sign)
```

These are *staged* curves, not ramps: they hold flat inside a section and move at
boundaries, with a step at the climax. That is what makes them read as a story rather than
as a slow zoom — a story advances in scenes.

---

## 4. Where it plugs in

Every one of these is an existing call site gaining an argument.

| site | change |
|---|---|
| `biasFor()` | tension modulates energy/density **within the kind's envelope**, bounded to ±0.2, so a breakdown at high tension is still a breakdown |
| `sampleValues(…, temperament)` | `extremity` scaled by tension — the ratchet for **escalation** |
| `assignRostersByKind()` | roster stays per kind; *which member plays* becomes a story decision (§5.1) |
| `buildStack()` | overlay chance follows `population`, not just energy |
| `rhythmFor()` | later acts pick from faster patterns; the resolution gets a held shot |
| `frameShot()` | `closeness` biases the size draw |
| `derivePaletteArc()` | new `'narrative'` mode keyed on act rather than on kind |
| `ArcDriver._paramsAt()` | `journey` comes from `story.journeyAt(frame)`; the slow axis gets its **sign from the plot**, not from `rng.bool()` |
| `ArcDriver.update()` | passes a story-shifted personality clone, memoised on rounded `reveal` exactly as `_paletteAt` memoises on rounded shift |

That last one is how the story reaches Epic 3's content registers without a new uniform:
`setPersonality` is already called every frame, and the identity uniforms are derived from
the personality object. Scaling `notchDepth`, `hollow`, `inkOutline`, `posterize` and
`latScaleSpread` toward their full values as `reveal` rises makes the song's cast literally
arrive over the course of the video.

---

## 5. The devices, ranked by legibility per unit of work

**5.1 The anchor is earned.** Today `roster[0]` opens every section of its kind. Instead,
reserve it: earlier drops play companions, and the anchor arrives at the climax. Same
roster, same identity, and now the biggest visual in the video lands on the biggest moment.
Roughly twenty lines.

**5.2 Recapitulation.** Under the **return** plot, the outro re-casts the intro's scene,
with the story's parameters rather than the intro's. The oldest device in music video and
the cheapest one here — the scene is already built and cached.

**5.3 The ratchet.** Under **escalation**, `ordinal/ordinalOf` scales temperament extremity
and slow-axis travel per recurrence. The fourth drop is measurably further out than the
first, on every param the scenes declare.

**5.4 Reveal schedule.** §4's identity scaling. Under **unveiling** the protagonist's
`u_cast*` form is a near-circle until the climax, then snaps to full at a downbeat.

**5.5 Punctuation.** A budget of **two or three single-use events** for the entire video,
spent at the moments in §3 — the only cut to black, the only symmetry-fold flip, the only
feedback reset. Single-use is the whole point: a device used twice is a style, used once it
is a moment. These are the only additions that need a flash-gate review.

---

## 6. How to know if it worked

The existing instrument can measure this almost unmodified. Build the section×section
descriptor distance matrix that `checks/variety` already knows how to produce, and ask
three questions of it:

* **Direction.** Does distance correlate with |i−j| beyond what kind explains? Today this is
  ~0 by construction: the matrix is kind-blocked, all drops mutually near, and time is
  invisible. A story makes it a gradient. This is the headline number.
* **Recurrence.** For a repeated kind, is `d(first, last) > d(first, middle)`? That is the
  ratchet, and it is the one a viewer names as "it kept going somewhere".
* **Coherence bound.** Adjacent-section distance must stay under the existing ceiling. A
  story that maximises Direction by shuffling scenes is the failure mode, and this is the
  gate that catches it.

Plus: each punctuation fires exactly once, on a downbeat, under the flash limit; and every
curve is a pure function of frame, so seek-exactness and the determinism grep hold.

**A prediction, stated in advance:** the seed-variety *floor* — how far a video travels from
itself — will **rise**, because that is what progression is. Epic 3 spent its effort pushing
that number down. Both are correct, and the instrument is what is wrong: it measures
distance and calls it drift, with no way to tell wandering from travelling. The fix is one
extra statistic, not a retreat from the feature — split the self-distance into an *ordered*
component (monotone with time; a story) and an *unordered* residual (a shuffle). Ship that
statistic **before** the feature, or the first honest measurement of Epic 4 will read as a
regression and be argued about instead of read.

---

## 7. Risks

**The story overrides the song.** A plot that declares a climax where the track is quiet is
worse than no plot. Mitigation is structural: moments are *found* in the audio (§3), never
placed by the seed, and tension is bounded inside the kind envelope so the quiet-kind
coupling in `directors.js` — the one that keeps an intro off a strobing scene — still holds
absolutely.

**Every video tells the same story.** The exact failure `directors.js` was written to fix.
Same mitigation: five plots, weighted, with seeded curve parameters inside each.

**It becomes a slow zoom.** If the curves are smooth ramps, this is an effect, not a
narrative. Staged curves with plateaus and a step at the climax are load-bearing, not a
refinement.

**Short tracks.** Under three sections, most of this has nothing to work with. Degrade to
the current behaviour explicitly rather than letting the curves do something arbitrary.

---

## 8. The smallest experiment worth running first

Do not build five plots on a prediction. Three changes, no new uniforms, no scene edits:

1. `Story.js` with position and moments only — no plot templates, one hardcoded
   **escalation** curve.
2. Wire it to exactly two sites: the slow-axis sign/magnitude in `_paramsAt`, and the anchor
   reservation in §5.1.
3. Add the **Direction** statistic to the variety report and run the song bank.

The prediction is specific: **Direction moves off zero and Coherence holds**, while the
between-song distance is unchanged — the story should differentiate a video *from itself in
time*, and have no opinion about other songs. If Direction does not move, the story is not
reaching the image and the rest of the epic is worth nothing until it does.

---

## 11. What was built, and what it measured

Built, in `look/Story.js` plus one argument at each call site listed in §4:

* position (`ordinal`/`ordinalOf`/act), the four moments, five plots with seeded curves;
* the anchor is earned (§5.1), the ratchet on temperament (§5.3), recapitulation (§5.2),
  the reveal schedule on the identity uniforms (§5.4), story-driven cut rate, framing
  closeness, and a `narrative` palette-arc mode;
* the slow axis now takes its **direction from the track** rather than a per-scene coin
  flip, and its journey from the staged story curve;
* Phase 13 (`checks/phase13.js`, 8 checks, no GPU) and the **direction** statistic in the
  variety report (`checks/variety/signature.js`).

Punctuation (§5.5) was **not** built — it is the only part that needs a flash-gate review,
and it is worth doing after the numbers below are understood rather than before.

### The first direction measurement

`checks.html?variety=1&library=0&seeds=6`, one song, against the arcless single-scene
reference:

```
floor      0.1697        direction   -0.14
observed   0.1594        arcless ref  0.01
ceiling    0.1996
```

The prediction in §8 was that direction moves off zero **upward**. It did not. Three
readings, in the order they should be checked:

1. **The recapitulation is fighting the statistic, by construction.** Roughly two videos in
   five recap, and `return` — the plot most likely to — is an arch that comes back. Its
   first and last probes are *deliberately* similar, which is exactly what a negative rank
   correlation between time separation and distance means. The statistic as written cannot
   tell ABA from no story at all; it may need to be measured against the journey curve
   rather than against clock time.
2. **Six seeds of one song is a small sample**, and the probe count (5) makes each video's
   correlation rest on ten pairs.
3. **The arc may not be reaching the image**, which is the reading that matters and the one
   §8 was written to expose. If 1 and 2 are controlled for and direction stays at zero, the
   story is moving parameters that do not change the picture — the same failure the slow
   axis had before scenes declared `slowAxis`, and the fix would be the same: name the
   levers rather than guessing at them.

The no-story control arm (the same report with the story layer bypassed) **did not
complete** — the run hung in the browser after the first arm, so the floor and separation
figures above are not yet attributable to this work either way. That comparison is the next
thing to run, and it should be run before any conclusion is drawn from the numbers.

---

## 12. The second direction measurement — reading 3 was right

Same invocation, `checks.html?variety=1&library=0&seeds=6`, after the two fixes in §12.1:

```
                §11          now
direction      -0.14       +0.24        arcless reference -0.02
floor          0.1697      0.2130
```

§8 predicted direction moves off zero **upward** and that the floor **rises**, because that
is what progression is. Both happened, and the epic's headline hypothesis is confirmed.

Of the three readings offered in §11, **reading 3 was the correct one**: the arc was not
reaching the image. The story layer was never the problem — it had nothing to speak
through. Two of the channels a narrative would have to travel down were inert, and neither
failure was visible from the source:

**The overlay path was structurally dead.** `buildStack` gated layering on
`surfaceOf(m) === 'composable'`, and no scene in the library declared `surface` — so the
only scene that could ever sit on top was the one declaring `role: 'accent'`, which the
overlay roster excluded by construction. Empty intersection, every time: **0/144 stacks
carried an overlay**. `population` had been wired to the overlay chance per §4 and moved a
number nothing read. Fixed by labelling the library from the phase 12 coverage gate — the
37 scenes painting under 30% of the frame are composable — and collapsing the reserved
accent slot into one path. 1 distinct overlay scene became 27, at 34% of stacks.

**The camera was inert.** `framing.shift` moved the frame by a median of **0.029** of a
half-frame at a fresh uniform angle every shot, so successive offsets cancelled and the
median jump at a cut was **0.014**. `closeness` reached shot SIZE per §4; the recentre got a
per-track constant and a die roll. Fixed by `look/Camera.js` — see §12.1. Median offset is
now 0.190 and the median reframe 0.135.

This is the same failure mode the slow axis had before scenes declared `slowAxis`, exactly
as reading 3 predicted, and it had the same shape: a lever that existed, was wired, was
covered by gates, and moved nothing. **Both passed every check that existed**, because every
bound on them was a ceiling. A device doing nothing clears a ceiling comfortably.

> The lesson worth carrying out of this epic: a gate on a *device* needs a floor, not only a
> limit. Three of the four new camera checks are floors for this reason.

Readings 1 and 2 are still uncontrolled — the recap arch and the small sample both still
apply, and the honest statement is that direction was measured under them both times, so the
*change* is attributable even though neither absolute figure is clean.

### 12.1 Built since §11

* `look/Camera.js` — the director's camera department, and the answer to "who translates
  story into imagery". Story says tension, order and act; this turns that into where the
  frame looks and how it travels there. Each director in `directors.js` names a camera.
  Jump distance follows tension and act, speed follows energy, curve is one of four, and a
  cut chooses between reframing and matching so two scenes can still read as one place.
  94% of shots now move *during* the shot — the recentre is no longer per-shot constant,
  which is a deliberate departure from the rule in `framing.js` (that rule was right about
  size and wrong about where the camera is looking).
* `surface` declared across the library, `role: 'accent'` retired in favour of
  `surface: 'composable'` plus `background: false`, and one layering path instead of two.
* Four camera gates in phase 11, each with a floor.

---

## 13. What is left

Ranked. Three of the four are measurements, and they all report through an instrument that
is currently broken — hence the ordering.

**13.1 The seed-variety instrument does not report.** Not in the original plan, and now the
first thing to fix:

```
separation — not computable: the reference landed below the floor
floor 0.2130 · ceiling 0.2179 · all six seeds read "thin"
```

The ceiling — videos built from casts sharing *no scenes* — is 0.2179 against a floor of
0.2130. Real seeds already differ by about as much as maximally-unrelated ones, so
separation divides by a near-zero interval and comes back `NaN`. This is the `separation
NaN` in the standing phase 12 failure, and it has been there across every run including the
pre-work baseline.

§11 anticipated this precisely — *"the instrument is what is wrong"* — and proposed the
direction split as the fix. But direction was added **alongside** the broken separation
rather than replacing it, so the gate now leads with an unreadable number while a working
one sits underneath. The decision to make: repair the ceiling, or retire separation and read
**(floor, direction)** as the pair.

**13.2 The coherence bound (§6).** Never built. Optional while direction sat at zero;
load-bearing now that it is +0.24, because nothing currently stops future work from buying
direction by making adjacent sections incoherent — the named failure mode in §6.

**13.3 Recurrence (§6).** Never built. `phase13` has a spec-level cousin — was the kind
recast, did tension move more than 0.08 — but not the descriptor-distance statistic
`d(first, last) > d(first, middle)`. That is the ratchet measured in the image rather than
in the spec, and §5.3 calls it the one a viewer names as "it kept going somewhere".

**13.4 Punctuation (§5.5).** Still the only part of the plan wholly unbuilt. Nothing in
`src/` mentions it. Needs the flash-gate review, which is why it was deferred; §11 said to
do it once the numbers were understood, and they now are.

**13.5 The no-story control arm.** Still never completed. Less urgent than when §11 was
written — direction clears the arcless reference by 0.26, which is hard to explain without
a story — but it remains the only thing that would attribute the floor rise (0.1697 →
0.2130) to this work rather than to everything else that changed alongside it.