Hear the system
from the inside.
Nine voices, drawn through time, signal and choice.
Start quietly. Choose Run or a voice name. The five conditions are simulated, never live. Silence stops every voice and its tail.
One cycle of the instrument, laid out in time. Click a voice name to play the whole voice now. Click any single event to hear that note alone. Dotted blocks are tails running past the cycle boundary — that overlap is what makes the chords connect. S solos a stave, M mutes it.
Reading it
| Mark | Means |
|---|---|
| Gold | a voice with a direct path to the output — you hear the oscillator itself |
| Blue | wet-only: reverb and resonators, no direct sound at all |
| Dotted | the tail, sounding past the cycle end and into the next chord |
| Hairlines in LOW | the 2-second pump — the low's second timescale, riding on top of the swell |
| Dashed gold rules | where the boundary can fall: 8.5 s to 15.5 s, set by the solar wind |
The routing, as it is built. Four destinations, nine voices, one trunk. Click a voice to play it. Click a rail to listen to only that path — then play anything and hear what survives the journey. LOW has no wet path at all; BOWL, LIGHT and AIR have no dry one.
Why the resonators matter more than the reverb
The reverb makes a space. The three band-pass resonators — retuned every cycle to the tones of the chord standing now — make the space belong to the harmony. Listen at Resonators only and strike the BOWL: what rings afterwards is not the bowl, it is the room agreeing with the chord. On a bowl strike the return is lifted from 0.035 to 0.085 and eased back over eight seconds.
Why this cycle sounds the way it does. Nothing here is a sequence: each punctuating voice rolls against a threshold the sky has set, inside a layer budget, under cooldowns and two guarantees. Drag the sky and the thresholds move; step a cycle and watch the rolls.
LOW, PAD, SYNTH and AIR are not in this table. They are not budgeted, gated or scheduled — they are the piece. Everything here is punctuation on that field. An overdue LIGHT bypasses the budget: measured over nine cycles it never played once, because the budget was always spent before the test was reached.
The chord turns when the sky has moved — accumulated change across all five channels — never on a clock. Candidates are scored by tones shared with the chord standing now, and the sky chooses among the smooth ones, not the smoothest. Click a candidate to turn the harmony onto it.
Begin on a chord tone · move mostly by step · answer a leap with a step in the opposite direction · stay inside a ninth · end on a chord tone. Every note is a scale degree in D major, so nothing outside the key can be produced. Click a note to hear it on the SYNTH.
No channel ever chooses a note. The sky sets how far the harmony walks and how often, and the voicing it arrives in — never what the harmony is.
A development model based on the supplied v1.3 sound blueprint. Simulated inputs replace live feeds; the current live artwork may differ. Space toggles scheduling, a full stop steps one cycle, and B toggles the field. Return to the Lab.