METHODS · 15 modules
Statistical workflow
Sample · Frame · Regress · Test · Boot · Lag · Code · Tab · Strata · Cohort · Factor · Seed · Tape · Gauge · Quantity.
A suite of twenty-eight open-source modules across five plugins that turn real statistical, social, and stochastic processes into control voltage you can patch anywhere in your rack. Sample a distribution as a modulation source, clock a segregation grid into a gate sequencer, let an epidemic curve sweep a filter. Quirky, generative, alive — and the math underneath is the genuine article, not a toy.
Stochast began as a teaching idea, but what it really is is a box of modular-synth instruments built from real mathematics. Each module is a genuine statistical, agent-based, or dynamical process — a bootstrap resampler, a Granovetter cascade, an SIR epidemic, a reaction-diffusion field — exposed as knobs and control voltage.
Patch them like anything else on your rack. A sampling distribution becomes a modulation source; a segregation grid becomes a generative gate pattern; a drift-diffusion decision fires triggers; an opinion-dynamics model becomes a slow, evolving CV sweep. The output is quirky and alive precisely because the process underneath behaves the way the theory says it should.
And the math is not faked for effect: every random draw is Mersenne-Twister-seeded and every closed-form quantity uses the standard numerical recipe (Lentz continued fractions, BCa bootstrap, Sanger's rule), so a patch is reproducible and the numbers are correct — it just happens to be fun. Want Stochast as a teaching tool instead? That now lives in the browser-based Empiria web app.
Each plugin is its own family of modules sharing a colored family-stripe under the header strip.
Sample · Frame · Regress · Test · Boot · Lag · Code · Tab · Strata · Cohort · Factor · Seed · Tape · Gauge · Quantity.
Cascade · Discourse · Pareto · Dilemma · Diffusion · Network. Granovetter cascades, opinion dynamics, wealth condensation, iterated dilemmas, small-world / scale-free networks.
Outbreak — SIR-style epidemic spread on Watts-Strogatz, Erdős-Rényi, and Barabási-Albert graphs. "Flatten the curve" is one patch cable away.
Life · Schelling · Turing. Conway's Game of Life with rule presets, Schelling segregation on a 24 × 24 grid, Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion traversing spots, stripes, labyrinths.
Prospect · Bandit · DDM. Kahneman-Tversky prospect theory, K-armed bandits with ε-greedy / UCB1 / Thompson sampling, Ratcliff drift-diffusion.
Every random module wraps std::mt19937 with an explicit, on-panel integer seed. Same seed produces byte-identical results on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Two-tailed t uses Lentz continued fractions for the incomplete beta. χ² uses regularized incomplete gamma. Bootstrap CIs are bias-corrected and accelerated (Efron 1987) with on-panel z₀ and â diagnostics.
.vcv patches are plain JSON. Tape's right-click Export buffer to CSV bridges Stochast into R / Python / Julia. Reproducible, and identical every time you load it.
Grab the latest .vcvplugin archives from GitHub releases.
github.com/shlabs-audio/stochast/releases →Move the archive into Rack's plugin folder; restart Rack. Modules appear under the SHLabs brand.
Full manual →Stochast is free for music, research, or teaching. If you'd like to credit it, cite the software:
@software{stochast,
author = {SHLabs},
title = {Stochast: Statistical and Social-Science
Modules for VCV Rack},
year = {2026},
url = {https://github.com/shlabs-audio/stochast}
}Teaching statistics is the job of the browser-based Empiria web app — a separate, classroom-focused tool.