For years, the live audiovisual stack has been a beautiful, fragile spiderweb. Resolume driving layers and clips. TouchDesigner generating procedural geometry or reactive particles. Ableton holding the pulse. Unreal Engine handling high-fidelity 3D. Tracking systems, lighting desks, custom OSC maps, and increasingly, generative AI agents whispering suggestions into the mix.
It works—until it doesn’t. A silent desync, a parameter that drifts, a generative agent that “creatively” pushes opacity past 1.0 or sends a tentacle into the audience’s face. Convention holds the system together. When something breaks, debugging becomes archaeology.
PCHI 2.0 (Peachy) proposes something different: move from convention-based to mathematics-based scene management. One shared language. Verified state. Equilibrium by design.
One Language for the Whole Creative Stack
PCHI is an open protocol for scene state. It standardizes messages for objects, control parameters, musical context, artist tracking, and more. Every message carries its own mathematical signature—PIR invariants (Prime Integer Relations)—rooted in the Prouhet–Thue–Morse sequence.
These aren’t decorative checksums. They encode equilibrium checks (a residual that should sit near (10^{-12})), coherence gaps that surface drift, and curvature signatures that describe the smoothness of transitions. The Conductor (PrimeSwarm Engine, written in Rust) receives proposed updates, verifies the invariants, applies Only-Lang governance rules, and only then broadcasts a coherent, validated state to every connected tool via UDP, WebSocket, or TCP.
Many tools. One truth.
Existing bridges already make this practical:
- A Python OSC bridge for Resolume Arena that calculates PIR values on the fly.
- A TouchDesigner Python CHOP that surfaces scene objects, BPM/beat/kick/snare, and equilibrium status as channels.
- A Max for Live device that watches Ableton’s musical state and injects verified musical context.
- Schemas in both human-readable JSON and high-performance FlatBuffers.
The result feels less like duct-taping software together and more like placing every tool inside the same mathematical spacetime.
Why Math People Should Care
The Prouhet–Thue–Morse sequence is one of those quietly profound objects: aperiodic, cube-free, deeply linked to automatic sequences, combinatorics on words, and even quantum information ideas. PCHI embeds a practical use of its sign sequence into the real-time critical path of a live performance system.
Equilibrium is no longer “the operator is watching the scopes.” It is a computed residual. Disequilibrium is caught before the frame is rendered. For anyone who has ever found beauty in invariant theory, discrepancy, or the way discrete mathematics can enforce continuous harmony, this is a concrete aesthetic application.
It also opens a clean interface for safe generative AI. Only-Lang is a simple rule DSL that lets you declare hard mathematical boundaries:
if kraken_tentacle.wobbliness > 0.8
then
kraken_tentacle.wobbliness = 0.8
end
Creative freedom remains. Clear boundaries are enforced at the protocol level rather than hoped for in prompt engineering.
Why AV Creatives Should Care
Live shows are increasingly multi-tool and multi-agent. The cost of silent failure rises with every additional node. PCHI does not replace your favorite software; it gives them a shared, verifiable nervous system.
You keep working in the environments you already love. The Conductor becomes the single source of truth. AI agents can propose changes without the risk of catastrophic divergence. Musical context from Ableton can drive visuals with mathematical confidence that the systems are still in phase. Tracking data and scene transforms stay coherent across Resolume, TouchDesigner, and Unreal.
In short: creativity without the chaos of unmanaged state.
The Larger Gesture
There is a long tradition of artists who treated mathematics not as constraint but as material—Escher’s tessellations, the geometric rigor of the Renaissance, contemporary practices that treat code and invariants as sculptural medium. PCHI sits in that lineage while remaining ruthlessly practical for the people who actually have to make a show happen at 11 p.m. with an audience in the room.
It is still early (the repository is open, the bridges exist, the schemas are public). But the direction is clear: treat the live creative system as something that can be proven coherent rather than merely assumed coherent.
Different tools. Same universe.
Explore the protocol, schemas, Conductor, and integrations at pchi.life and the open repository. The math is already in the messages. The question is what you will build once every part of the stack speaks the same verified language.
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