How to Use It
- Starting Click the red pill. A brief station ID announces itself, then the intro plays automatically — Welle:Erdball, the band the piece takes its name from (see "Sources of Inspiration" below) — while the first candidates are searched for in the background. In a hurry? Click SKIP INTRO. After that, random broadcasting starts on its own; if the candidate pool is still too thin at that point, READY. briefly appears with a PLAY button for a manual start.
- On desktop: full screen recommended Press F11 for your browser's full screen mode: the four country matrices and the C64 terminal area only really work with a bit of room.
- For full tracks instead of 30-second previews: log into Spotify first Open open.spotify.com in a separate tab and log in there before starting GLOBAL RANDOM — a regular account is enough, no Premium needed, no ads play. While logging in, the browser will repeatedly suggest opening the Spotify app instead. Ignore that, log in through the browser. A green checkmark in the footer area of GLOBAL RANDOM confirms the login; after that, no more preview clips should appear, only full tracks. The Spotify tab closes without any trouble afterward — just don't log out there, or the embedded player loses its access in the background.
- Keep what catches your ear In the embedded Spotify player, click the "+" icon top right — the track gets saved directly to your own Spotify account, into your favorites (Liked Songs), permanently and not just for this session. From there, explore the artist, the album, or whatever else sits nearby in the catalog, at your own pace.
- Browser & possible sources of trouble Works in all common browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge; Safari not tested so far). An active VPN can occasionally interfere with the connection to the embedded Spotify player — if there's no sound at all, try briefly disabling the VPN. Stuck with 30-second previews despite logging in per step 3: Firefox's "Enhanced Tracking Protection" (Total Cookie Protection) blocks the embedded Spotify player by default from accessing its own login cookies from the separate tab — the browser locks itself out here for privacy reasons. Fix: click the shield icon on the left of the address bar and turn off protection for this site.
- On mobile: only 30-second previews are possible The Spotify login trick from step 3 doesn't work on mobile — that's a limitation on Spotify's end, not GLOBAL RANDOM's. On mobile it stays at short 30-second clips; extra elements like the info cards or the snowfall of titles in up to 87 languages are missing there too — that keeps things lean.
Concept
Starting Point
Streaming services are listening. They remember what we like and give us more of it. The result is a loop: the more you listen, the more you hear the same thing. GLOBAL RANDOM breaks that loop. The work chooses music not by taste but by chance — genuine randomness, drawn from the millions of tracks that MusicBrainz documents and Spotify carries. The link between a MusicBrainz entry and its matching Spotify track isn't made by an algorithm — it comes from real, volunteer editors in the MusicBrainz community, curated by hand rather than guessed by a machine.
Democracy as Lottery
The title says what it's about: Democracy of Sound. Here, democracy doesn't mean majority rule — it means lottery. Every country gets a chance: Kazakhstan as much as the US, Jamaica as much as the UK. A dedicated mechanism keeps any single country from dominating the pool, even though the underlying database is skewed. Pure randomness wouldn't be fair — it would just copy that imbalance. So the work intervenes, quietly but firmly.
Here, democracy doesn't mean majority — it means lottery.
Historical Precedents of the Lottery
The Lottery in Antiquity
This isn't a new idea. In ancient Athens, most offices weren't elected — they were drawn by lot. A device made of clay, the kleroterion, made the decision. That wasn't a side detail of democracy; it was its core. Elections favor whoever is well-known, wealthy, or good at speaking. The lottery treats everyone the same. GLOBAL RANDOM stands in that old tradition — not in the modern one, where democracy means majority rule.
A Universal Idea
The lottery is ancient, and it's everywhere. The Chinese I Ching has been reading yarrow stalks for over two thousand years. The Ifá oracle of the Yoruba in West Africa still reads palm nuts today, by the millions. The Bible has the twelfth apostle chosen by lot. People in wildly different parts of the world independently arrived at the same idea: where humans shouldn't or can't decide, let chance decide. The idea never died out. It lives on in every jury made up of randomly summoned citizens. It lives on in the citizens' assemblies enjoying a revival today — Ireland, France, East Belgium. That, too, is a revival of the lottery against pure majority rule.
Blessed Chance, Forbidden Game
Not every kind of chance counted the same. Medieval preachers drew a strict line between the blessed lot and the devil's dice. Anyone who put a question to fate using the Bible, using the Sortes Sanctorum, was usually left alone. Anyone who rolled dice for money was, as one preacher put it, playing with "Decius" instead of "Deus" — a pun that turned the dice table into an altar for the devil. The difference was never in the mechanism; chance is chance either way. It was in the intent: are you seeking guidance, or are you trying to win? GLOBAL RANDOM promises no winnings. It falls squarely on the old, tolerated side of that distinction.
The Skewed Database
Why the Data Is Skewed
Why is the database skewed at all? Not just because wealthy countries have bigger music industries. Music spreads differently depending on where you live. Someone making music in Berlin or New York uploads to a streaming service almost automatically. Someone making music in many other parts of the world often does it differently: on cassette tape, through messaging apps, on local radio, live at a festival — never on a platform, never catalogued. GLOBAL RANDOM only draws from the part of the world that has already made the jump onto Spotify. That's a limit, not a lie. The work doesn't show all the music in the world. It shows what the digital world has managed to capture of it.
Numbers
Numbers make this more tangible than any description could:
Chance doesn't fully even that out — it just shows it more honestly than any algorithm ever would.
Aesthetics & Artistic References
Screen & Language
You can see it on screen: titles fall like snow, each one translated into up to 87 languages in real time. The words arrive, overlap, and vanish again. You can't read them all. That's intentional. Culture happens simultaneously, in many places, in many languages — no single person can take it all in at once.
Chance in Art
The visual style quotes old computers: green text, terminal lines, a font straight off a C64. No accident — back in the sixties, artists like Cage and Xenakis were already building chance into their music: with coin tosses, with the I Ching, with probability theory. Early computers pushed that idea further.
Dave: Einstürzende Neubauten's Cards
Einstürzende Neubauten belong to this lineage too. Their system is called Dave — named after the voice of the first GPS device Blixa Bargeld ever owned. It's a box of 600 cards, each bearing an instruction: an instrument, a way of playing, sometimes just a single word like "chance." Before playing, each musician draws a few cards and follows what's written on them. Open to interpretation, but determined by the draw — no single musician alone decides what comes next. GLOBAL RANDOM places itself in this lineage — and at the same time against today's platforms, which do exactly the opposite: predict everything, leave nothing to chance.
Oracle & Interpretation
Like a Tarot Deck
If you want, you can also use GLOBAL RANDOM like a tarot deck. Laying out cards, playing solitaire, consulting the I Ching — people have always used chance procedures to put a question to fate. In this piece, the answer doesn't come as a card, but as a song title. Sometimes mundane. Sometimes, by chance, oddly precise.
Like on the Radio
Everyone knows this from the radio: a song comes on and fits the situation you're in perfectly. Usually there's just an editor with some taste behind it, and a coincidence that let your own moment collide with someone else's choice. With GLOBAL RANDOM, even the editor is gone. Nobody picked the title for you. What's left is chance alone — with no outside intention you could later read into it.
Three Face-Down Cards
The three candidates in the queue are like three face-down cards. Only one gets turned over at a time. The dice decide which one — not minutes or hours ahead, but at the very last moment, right before the new track begins. The instant it's revealed, the next face-down card slides in to take its place. No answer sits ready in a drawer. It only forms the instant the question is being asked. Chance really does happen live, in real time — that's exactly what makes the system interesting as an oracle. Like the tarot mentioned above, except here not even the piece itself knows the card in advance.
The Answer: a Song Title
What gets turned over in the end isn't an image or a card, but a song title. That fits the oracle idea: song titles are rarely neutral. They're often striking in their own right, sometimes downright weighty — short, compressed lines, built to land. That's exactly what makes the random hit charming: it's usually already a genuine statement, one that can be read as a message.
A Message?
Some will hear a message in the randomly drawn title. Psychologists call this an idea of reference: the world suddenly seems to be speaking directly to you. Almost everyone knows a mild version of this — from the radio, from glancing at a clock, from a book falling open at random. That's part of the work's invitation — and at the same time a very human, very old pattern of giving chance a meaning. Anyone who feels more affected by this than is good for them is welcome to simply close the piece at any time.
Donate
Whoever listens can also donate. One click leads to GiveDirectly — money goes directly to people living in extreme poverty, with no detour. That's not an add-on; it's part of the idea. Chance shows that music comes from everywhere equally. The world itself isn't nearly so fair. Whoever hears that can do something about it.
Chance, Providence, Free Will
Free Will
For the artist, chance carries a second, personal meaning too — though he deliberately leaves open who or what stands behind it. One possible reading: God gave humanity free will. Whoever grants free will no longer intervenes directly — otherwise the will wouldn't be free. Whoever or whatever stands behind it, then, can't steer the world without breaking that freedom — if it acts at all, it's more likely through chance. Every lot, every roll, every random turn of events — a possible way for something to act without touching human will. Whether that's God, a counterpart, or something that evades naming altogether: GLOBAL RANDOM makes the thought audible, without asserting it. The randomness that decides the music here is more than a technical principle — it leaves open whose hand, if any, is in play.
Physics and Providence
This thought doesn't stand alone. The physicist William Pollard — also an Episcopal priest — worked it out in 1958 in his book "Chance and Providence": because quantum mechanics contains genuine, not merely apparent randomness, the universe actually has open spaces where something could act without breaking natural law or overriding anyone's will. The research field built on this is called "Divine Action" today; physicists like Robert John Russell or John Polkinghorne still carry it forward.
Thomas Aquinas
The idea is older still in Thomas Aquinas, back in the 13th century: what looks like chance from a human vantage point doesn't rule out divine providence — quite the opposite. The very randomness of a limited perspective can be exactly the channel through which providence unfolds, without ever being recognizable as intervention.
Einstein
Einstein said: God does not play dice. Physics proved him wrong — the dice are real, with no hidden mechanism behind them. But maybe Einstein was right after all, just not in the way he meant. Maybe God really doesn't play dice. Maybe he just uses the real dice as cover.
Chance remains chance. Only the meaning behind it stays hidden.
How It Works
True Randomness Is Hard
Even for computers, genuine randomness is a problem — one of the hardest in all of computer science. A computer is a deterministic machine: same input, always the same output. True randomness doesn't exist inside one. What programs like this use is pseudo-randomness — an algorithm that looks random but, once you know the seed, stays fully predictable. For a work of art, that's enough. For encryption, it isn't — that needs real entropy, from noise, from radioactive decay, from lava lamps filmed by a camera. GLOBAL RANDOM uses the browser's plain random function. Honest enough for art, too weak for a safe's lock.
How the Piece Searches
In the background, the piece continuously searches random slices of the MusicBrainz database — not front to back, but all over the place, so every corner of the huge catalog gets a genuine chance. From the hits, a waiting pool fills up, country by country: up to six candidates per country. Older candidates age back out, so the pool stays fresh.
Three Candidates, One Draw
At the start, the piece draws three candidates from the country pools into the queue — each from a randomly chosen country. One of the three gets played, the dice decide. As soon as playback is running, the piece refills the newly empty slot right away: chance decides again which country the next candidate comes from, and which candidate from that pool it is. That way there are always three candidates in the queue. Once a track ends, the dice decide again which of the three is up next.
Patience Is Rewarded
One side effect of this design: right at the start of a session, a handful of countries often dominate the selection — simply because the piece has only combed through a few MusicBrainz slices so far. Anyone who lets the piece run for hours notices the rarer country pools gradually filling in, and the music growing steadily more varied. Patience really does pay off here.
One File, No Server
And one more thing: GLOBAL RANDOM is a single file — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in one, with no backend of its own, no database, no account system. Not a server in the sense of "runs somewhere for you" — it just needs some plain https:// webspace to sit on, or the Spotify player won't cooperate in the browser (opened locally by double-click, Spotify refuses full playback for security reasons). Whoever has the file can pass it on, copy it, upload it to any webspace they like. That's the most political decision in the whole piece — it refuses not just the algorithm, but also dependence on any one particular platform that might otherwise be needed to show this work.
The Fight Has Begun...
One small, unplanned punchline to close on: run GLOBAL RANDOM through your own Spotify account, and you're live-feeding Spotify's own recommendation algorithm a listening profile that simply cannot be modeled. A track from Israel, then Puerto Rico, then a Strauss symphony, then ASMR, then North Korea. No machine-learning model on earth finds a pattern in that for "what to suggest next." The piece's subtitle, "The fight against the algorithm has begun," was originally meant as a stance, not a technical claim — it came true anyway, just one level deeper than planned: you end up sabotaging, live, exactly the system this installation conceptually stands against. Not through refusal. Through overwhelming it with genuine diversity.
Sources of Inspiration
GLOBAL RANDOM is inspired by Welle:Erdball — by the band as it sounds today, and by the radio drama they owe their name to. "Hallo! Hier Welle Erdball!" was the work with which Fritz Walter Bischoff, then director of the Schlesische Funkstunde in Breslau, created the last great radio drama of the Weimar Republic in 1928. Technically, he was ahead of his time: he didn't broadcast it live, but pre-produced it, mounted on film soundtrack — with cuts and rhythms nobody had attempted on radio before. That same inventive spirit, plus an enthusiasm for the electronics of the Commodore 64, still carries the band today: since 1993 they've consistently presented themselves as an imaginary radio station, calling their albums "broadcasts," their members "announcers" — and every broadcast opens with the words "Hallo, hier spricht Welle:Erdball." A piece that randomly broadcasts from all over the world, and a fictional station claiming to speak from the ether — the two have more in common than they first seem to. Down to lyric lines like "connections that don't exist," which almost read as a comment on this piece's own randomness, written years before the fact.
Imprint
Information pursuant to § 5 TMG/DDG (German law — this site is operated from Germany):
Andreas Schumm
Am Mittelfeld 2e
01640 Coswig
Germany
Phone: +49 3523 8673812
Email: info@crazy-midi.de
This site is also reachable under the domain global-random.radio.
Responsible for content pursuant to § 18 para. 2 MStV (German Interstate Media Treaty): Andreas Schumm (address as above).
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GLOBAL RANDOM embeds the following external services, each of which may independently process data once used: Spotify (embedded player — sets and reads its own cookies, including for analyzing usage behavior, regardless of whether one is logged into Spotify), MusicBrainz (music database queries), MyMemory (sends the song title to be translated to the translation service), Wikipedia/Wikidata (artist/country information), Open-Meteo (weather data per country). Each of these services is subject to its own privacy policy; the operator of this site has no influence over their data processing.
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