CULL_RATIONALE.md

music/exemplars/expansion/CULL_RATIONALE.md

Expansion wave — adversarial cull rationale

Date: 2026-08-05. Consumer: docs/proposals/music/MASTERPIECE_PROGRAM.md rung 1-2 (measurement rig → formula cards). Target file: build/audio/exemplars/CORPUS.json.

Four era curators (SNES/16-bit 32, N64 30, PS1/Saturn 32, GC-PS2-PC 32) proposed 126 candidates. The adversarial pass kept 68 and cut 58. Base corpus was 114 rows (not 115 — EX_100 and EX_105 are absent; EX_105 Answers is on the excluded array). Merged total: 182.

The bar that was actually applied

Josh is buying and listening to every row. So the test was never fame:

• A candidate loses to any row — existing or candidate — that already teaches its named device. Two tracks teaching the same lesson is one wasted purchase.
• A famous track with a redundant grammar loses to an obscure one with a device nothing else has. That rule cost this wave Corneria, Nerevar Rising, MEGALOMANIA, Dragon Roost Island and Melodies of Life.
• The rig reads audio files. A device that lives only in the game engine and is not audible in the released recording cannot be measured, so it cannot justify a purchase. This cut Lost Woods (mix level as wayfinding), Sloprano (aria gated by player hits), Forest of Hope (layers entering as the squad grows) and Koopa Troopa Beach (final-lap transposition). State-varied cues whose variants ship as separate OST tracks — Clock Town Day 1/2/3, Click Clock Wood's four seasons, dataDyne's two mixes, The Great Sea vs Farewell Hyrule King — survived, because the delta between them is measurable.

Dedup result

• No candidate duplicated an existing row. Nearest passes are same-game different-track and were checked one by one: Spyro, Ridge Racer Type 4, Chrono Cross, Silent Hill, Super Metroid, Ocarina of Time, Pokemon Gold & Silver, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Kirby, Animal Crossing/Wave Race (both Totaka), Mario Kart 64/Wind Waker (both Nagata).
• No cross-curator collision survived. Corneria was proposed only by the SNES lane; the N64 lane had already ceded it.
• Zero excluded tracks re-entered. ...Steel for Humans, Amusement Park, Answers — all three verified absent from the additions, and the excluded array plus exclusion_law are byte-identical to their previous state.
• Note for future waves: three curator files cite EX_105 Answers as a live corpus row in their comparison prose. It is not — it was excluded. Their reasoning is stale on that one point only; no candidate depended on it.

Attribution verification

Composer fields were re-derived rather than inherited. Findings:

• Tristram was wrong and is corrected. The curator filed it as Diablo II (2000). The iconic solo twelve-string cue is Diablo (1996), Matt Uelmen; Diablo II only quotes part of it inside the Act I "Rogue" material. Corpus row now reads Diablo.
• Majora's Mask is credited to Koji Kondo and Toru Minegishi, and the per-track split is not publicly resolved for Clock Town, Stone Tower Temple or Final Hours. Those three rows carry the credited pair rather than a guessed individual.
• Star Fox 64 splits Kondo (tracks 1-3, 5, 6, 28-30) against Wakai (4, 7-27) on the OST listing, which makes Star Wolf most likely Wakai's — but "most likely" is not a provenance claim, so the row carries Koji Kondo & Hajime Wakai.
• Pokemon Gold & Silver rows carry Junichi Masuda & Go Ichinose (Ichinose joined on G/S and the per-track split is unresolved). The existing EX_031 National Park row credits Masuda alone; it was left byte-identical per the merge instruction, so the corpus is briefly inconsistent on this game and should be normalised on a later pass, not here.
• Okami is Capcom Sound Team — Masami Ueda (lead), Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Rei Kondoh, Akari Kaida. Rows carry the first three.
• The Wind Waker rows: The Great Sea is Kenta Nagata; Farewell Hyrule King carries Kenta Nagata & Hajime Wakai because the game's four-composer team makes the per-track credit uncertain and the row's whole value is being Nagata's Great Sea material transformed.
• Perfect Dark carries the credited trio (Kirkhope, Norgate, Clynick).
• Confirmed as filed: Terranigma (Miyoko Kobayashi/Takaoka & Masanori Hikichi), Kirby Super Star Gourmet Race (Jun Ishikawa & Dan Miyakawa), Lufia II (Yasunori Shiono), Star Fox 64 pairing, Okami year 2006.
• Dropped partly on attribution risk: Sonic 3 Ice Cap (authorship genuinely contested — the SNES curator flagged this itself and did not propose it), Mega Man X Opening Stage (per-track credit among four Capcom composers unresolved and its device was redundant anyway).

Final class balance

EXPLORATION and TITLE_CHARACTER dominate, as Josh's Nintendo-nostalgia ruling implies — but every thin class gained real rows with era-specific grammars the modern-heavy base list had none of: BOSS gained groove-based and swing-based menace (Meridian Dance's 3-against-4 hemiola, Fight Against an Armed Boss's big-band threat) plus an absent-melody boss (Pokey Means Business!); TENSION gained event-spacing-only dread (Lower Norfair), retrograde-playable writing (Stone Tower Temple) and a two-mix alert-state cue (dataDyne Central); CREDITS_TRIUMPH gained the short resolving reward fanfare (Great Fairy's Fountain — the corpus had none and the game needs hundreds), terminal modulation (Smiles and Tears), quiet triumph (Theme of Samus Aran) and the cast-roster rondo (FF6 Ending, the structural model for a 79-chapter finale).

Structural gaps deliberately closed

• State-varied cues. The base 114 is fixed-form almost throughout. Two variation axes are now in: countdown erosion (Clock Town Day 1 against its Day 2/3 siblings) and seasonal re-orchestration (Click Clock Wood), plus cell-resequencing (Hyrule Field) and alert-state two-mix (dataDyne Central). Rung 2 should card the delta between states, not just the cue.
• Non-Western modal colour. The base 114 has none. Three specimens on three different modes and three different budgets: Shinshu Field (yo scale, traditional instruments, ornament-as-development), Ecruteak City (in-scale/miyako-bushi semitone pentatonic on four chip channels), Vamo' Alla Flamenco (Phrygian dominant with palmas as the metric voice).
• The corpus's first theme PAIR. EX_139 The Great Sea and EX_167 Farewell Hyrule King are one motif in two emotional states, transformed metrically and cadentially. This is the artefact the leitmotif program actually needs and the base list could not supply.
• Hardware-constraint idioms. Echo-DSP written as counterpoint (The Submerged City), delay as a countable lane (Phendrana Drifts), arpeggio-as-chord tracker writing (Deus Ex), four-part chorale grandeur without reinforcement (Fillmore), a full climax on four mono channels (Battle! Champion).
• Genesis FM and the club event grammar (Chemical Plant Zone, Go Straight) — the base 114 had zero FM rows, and the rig's drop/raise magnitude pass had no sparse, pre-loudness-war specimen to calibrate against.

The ten closest calls — killed, and why

1. Corneria (Star Fox, 1993) — killed by EX_125 Prologue ~ To the Ancient Land. Both are a rising perfect-fourth heroic call answered lower, and Otani's adds real stretto/canon. Corneria's differentiator was "grandeur from four voices", which is the single most over-subscribed claim in the whole candidate set (Fillmore, Battle! Champion, Tristram, Andy's Theme, Pallet Town all made it). Famous, redundant, cut.

2. MEGALOMANIA (Live A Live, 1994) — killed on "nothing is added for four minutes", which is now carried three ways: Never Forget (frozen ostinato, arc by density), The Great Sea (everything constant, harmony varies), Meridian Dance (escalation by hemiola alone). Its second argument — an early sample-budgeted Shimomura control against her orchestral rows — survives anyway through EX_131 and EX_155.

3. Dragon Roost Island (Wind Waker, 2002) — killed by EX_137 Vamo' Alla Flamenco. Same pairing (Spanish guitar idiom + standing hemiola), and Vamo' adds Phrygian dominant, a mode nothing else in 182 rows has. Wind Waker still gets two rows, as the theme pair.

4. Final Hours vs Lower Norfair — nearly cut Final Hours; kept both, then cut Magmoor Caverns and Secure Place (RE2) instead. All four teach dread from absence. The surviving two are a deliberate A/B on entrainment: Lower Norfair has no locatable pulse at all (event spacing is the only variable), Final Hours has one and makes its RATE the variable. Magmoor and Secure Place sat between them and added nothing measurable.

5. Sheik's Theme (Ocarina of Time, 1998) — motif transformation as narrative reveal is genuinely load-bearing for this project's reveal discipline. Cut anyway: the transformation-pair slot went to The Great Sea / Farewell Hyrule King, which is a cleaner measurable delta, and Zelda was already taking seven additions. This is the one cut most worth revisiting if a later wave has room.

6. Mad Monster Mansion (Banjo-Kazooie, 1998) — killed by EX_134 Click Clock Wood, same composer and same game. Both are "one theme, N re-orchestrations"; Click Clock Wood's four seasonal states are the larger and better-released dataset. Spatial-axis versus temporal-axis was not a big enough difference to buy twice.

7. Melodies of Life (FF9, 2000) — killed by EX_181 Small Two of Pieces ~ Stars of Tears. Both are "the closer earns its weight from thirty hours of seeding"; Mitsuda's gives a measurable transform (field theme, relative major, halved tempo) plus a triplet vocal floating over a duple bass. Also relieved Uematsu saturation, which the wave had to manage deliberately.

8. Bowser's Galaxy Reactor (Super Mario Galaxy, 2007) — triple-metre ceremonial menace is a register we need and the corpus still lacks a live-orchestra example of. Cut because EX_153 Gang-Plank Galleon already holds a triple-metre boss, and its economy claim (climax by register and re-articulation, never by density) is rarer, plus it corrects a formula-card error the rig would otherwise make about David Wise being an atmosphere composer.

9. Sea Shanty 2 (RuneScape, 2004) and Frosty Village (Diddy Kong Racing, 1997) — both cut on loop endurance, which is now held by 2 AM (designed non-cadence on chord extensions) and The Great Sea (reharmonisation as the only variation). Sea Shanty 2's inverted B strain and Frosty Village's anti-cadence bass were real devices that lost to stronger holders of the same lesson.

10. Live & Learn (Sonic Adventure 2, 2001), Pearl Blue Soul (R4, 1998) and Delfino Plaza (Super Mario Sunshine, 2002) — the three that hurt to lose on count alone. Live & Learn's withheld suspension collides with the anti-cadence cluster and SA2 already has EX_151; Pearl Blue Soul's hook-as-voicing is genuinely absent but the corpus already carries EX_104 Motor Species from that OST; Delfino Plaza's clave interlock lost to EX_137 and its one-motif-many-ensembles claim lost to Click Clock Wood.

Consolidations worth recording

Four composers were represented by multiple overlapping candidates. One row each was kept, on device, not on fame:

• Sakimoto/Iwata — three candidates (Fight It Out!, Ogre Battle 64 Opening, Trisection) all claiming quartal march writing with independent inner voices. Kept Trisection; it adds the melody-in-fixed-lag-behind-its-own-snare device the other two do not.
• Sakuraba — three candidates (Fighting of the Spirit, Stab the Sword of Justice, Confidence in the Domination). Kept Fighting of the Spirit for non-functional constant-structure harmony as the adrenaline source. Named loss: asymmetric phrase length (Stab the Sword's 5- and 7-bar groupings so the loop point never lands where predicted) is a real anti-fatigue device that no surviving row carries. If a future wave buys one more BATTLE row, buy that one.
• Choir-as-percussion — three candidates (Primal Eyes, Vs. Meta Ridley, Liberi Fatali). Kept Liberi Fatali (consonants as the rhythm section plus a metric regrouping at constant tempo) and Grahf (odd-meter 3+2+2 chant, the only asymmetric-meter row in the corpus). Cut Primal Eyes and Vs. Meta Ridley.
• Tracker idiom — two van den Bos candidates. Kept Deus Ex Main Title for arpeggio-as-chord, which is on Josh's own hunt list; cut Foregone Destruction, whose transposition-as-development engine is held by EX_146 Battle #2.
• Delay as a voice — six candidates. Kept two: The Submerged City (16-bit, write sparse and let the delay finish the line — a directly actionable generator instruction) and Phendrana Drifts (modern, forces the rig to decide whether an echo counts as a lane). Cut Facility, Balue's Tower, Sunrise Spring, and demoted the claim on Simon Belmont, which is kept for its systematic offbeat anticipation instead.

Full cut list (58)

Emitted by script from the four curator files minus the 68 rows carrying "expansion": true in CORPUS.json — not hand-typed.

SNES/16-bit — 7 cut of 32: Corneria (Star Fox); Flower Garden (Yoshi's Island); Crysta (Terranigma); Opening Stage / Highway (Mega Man X); Fight It Out! (Tactics Ogre); MEGALOMANIA (Live A Live); Hyrule Castle (A Link to the Past).

N64 — 19 cut of 30: Lost Woods / Saria's Song (OoT); Song of Storms (OoT); Sheik's Theme (OoT); Ending Theme / Staff Roll (OoT); Majora's Wrath (Majora's Mask); Super Mario 64 Main Theme (SM64); Slider (SM64); Area 6 (Star Fox 64); Pallet Town (Pokemon R/B); Bicycle (Pokemon R/B); Mad Monster Mansion (Banjo-Kazooie); Fungi Forest (DK64); Frosty Village (Diddy Kong Racing); Koopa Troopa Beach (Mario Kart 64); Windy (Conker's BFD); Sloprano (Conker's BFD); Facility (GoldenEye 007); Shooting Star Summit (Paper Mario); Ogre Battle 64 Opening Theme.

PS1/Saturn — 18 cut of 32: Primal Eyes (Parasite Eve); Dream of the Shore Bordering Another World (Chrono Cross); Bonds of Sea and Fire (Xenogears); Sunrise Spring (Spyro: YotD); Fossil Field (Ape Escape); Beautiful Golden City (Suikoden); Stab the Sword of Justice (Star Ocean 2); Confidence in the Domination (Valkyrie Profile); Thermosphere (Einhander); The Extreme (FF8); Dark Messenger (FF9); Gothic Neclord (Suikoden II); Radical Dreamers ~Unstolen Jewel~ (Chrono Cross); Lost Painting (Symphony of the Night); Secure Place / Save Room (Resident Evil 2); Balue's Tower (Klonoa); Pearl Blue Soul (Ridge Racer Type 4); Melodies of Life (FF9).

GC/PS2/PC — 14 cut of 32: Nerevar Rising (Morrowind); Andy's Theme (Advance Wars); Dragon Roost Island (Wind Waker); Forest of Hope (Pikmin); Sea Shanty 2 (RuneScape); Delfino Plaza (Super Mario Sunshine); Foregone Destruction (Unreal Tournament); Terran Theme 1 (StarCraft); Vs. Meta Ridley (Metroid Prime); Bowser's Galaxy Reactor (Super Mario Galaxy); Promise / Reprise (Silent Hill 3); Magmoor Caverns (Metroid Prime); Winds Across the Plains (Fire Emblem: Blazing Blade); Live & Learn (Sonic Adventure 2).

Devices we knowingly did not buy

Named honestly so a later wave can pick them up rather than rediscover them:

• Asymmetric phrase length as anti-fatigue (Stab the Sword of Justice, 5- and 7-bar groupings over a constant subdivision) — the highest-value single loss in the wave.
• Hook-as-voicing rather than hook-as-contour (Pearl Blue Soul's maj9-add6 Rhodes stab).
• Motif transformation used as a narrative reveal (Sheik's Theme) — load-bearing for this project's reveal discipline; lost to Zelda concentration and the Wind Waker pair.
• Interactive musical form (Sloprano, where player hits advance the aria) — unmeasurable from the released recording, so it is a design reference, not a purchase.
• Diegetic/scored ambiguity (Magmoor Caverns' high sine tone that reads as both instrument and machine) — relevant to the L1.5 ambient lane if that lane ever needs its own card.

Acquisition note for Josh

68 rows to buy or lawfully download into D:/audio/exemplars/. Nine of them are cheap in a specific sense — Clock Town Day 1, Click Clock Wood and dataDyne Central are only fully useful if their sibling variants come with them (Clock Town Day 2 and Day 3; Click Clock Wood's summer/autumn/winter; dataDyne's action mix). Those siblings are not separate corpus rows and should not be, but they are part of the same purchase, because the formula card is the delta between them.

Generated by harness/site/structure_site.py — the URL path is the repo path. review root