Method for Mutable Lists in Memory

The goal is simple -

MIDI Note In → Random MIDI Pitch Out, chosen from a user-defined list of allowed notes.

Additional Notes

• Duration is preserved

• list in memory must stay de-duped

• Kslider in polyphonic mode is used to select the notes

• current build uses strip-note from Keyslider to determine if the note should be added or removed from the list

  • velocity zero → remove element from list

  • velocity nonzero → add note to list and dedupe (zl.union)

• Everything I tried failed

• I'm implementing it in Max4Live but i have the standalone version too?

Nothing that I've tried worked. If ZL objects, Bags, and the Coll object don't work, do I need to move on to the bulkier Dict object? It seems like such a primitive function of programming, I'll be surprised if I'm not missing something completely obvious?

• coll was tried first, but adding or removing an entry also caused output, which made list editing trigger unwanted MIDI events.

• zl.reg was tried as quieter storage, but it only remembers a complete list handed to it; it did not conveniently manage incremental note additions and removals.

• We then worked through zl.union, zl.remove, bag, list lengths, random indices, and ordering problems. The add and remove paths were difficult to keep synchronized, especially because note and velocity output order from kslider complicated the logic.

Ultimately, I abandoned the idea and simplified to one contiguous pitch range, just choosing random numbers in a range.

Is there a canonical way to do this?