Queued since the shell and last in every list, because the plan filed snick sounds under the cute trap with the grid clock and the pulses: seasoning until it demonstrates the system. Dan's seed gave it a way in — a seven-column grid exposes five engageable strings, which suggests a pentatonic scale as a pulse passes over them — and the study takes the seed literally. Columns are strings. The two columns that carry a sliver cannot be clean strings, because the near-miss of the two grids is a thing you can hear: two plucks a microcolumn apart in pitch beat against each other. That leaves five clean strings at 7×5, and they are the pentatonic; three at 5×3, a triad; two at 3×2, a fifth. Rows are the register, a block is a chord, a pulse is a pluck, and the composition of the day is read in reading order at the Circuit's tempo. Nothing sounds until you ask, and everything that sounds is written down.
Seed 16 on the page's pair, four rows, the engine's own composition; over it, one string per base column with its note at the foot. The sliver columns are drawn dashed in the signal colour: their string is a pair, a microcolumn apart in pitch, and the table gives the beat in hertz. Press sound to allow it — no audio context exists before that — then click a column to pluck it (higher on the stage, higher the register), or give the stage focus and press 1 to 7. strum runs the columns left to right, which at 7×5 is the scale with its two buzzes in it.
| column | string | note | Hz | beat | why |
|---|
The Circuit's pulse — a square three-sixteenths of a row on a side, one row per beat — travels a row line of the bench and plucks each string it crosses, one column a beat at 220 milliseconds. Crossing a sliver column it buzzes. The row chooses the register: a pulse on the top row plays an octave up, on the bottom row an octave down. The score of the pass is written below as it plays.
The home page's composition of the day, read aloud: the blocks in DOM order — reading order, the plan's rule for screen readers — one block per beat, each a chord of the strings it spans at the register of its row, strummed twenty milliseconds apart; the breakouts after, on the overlay grid, which is the second voice: the same five degrees with no buzz (the slivers belong to the pair, not to either grid), plucked shorter and brighter. The sounding block carries the signal colour while it rings — one at a time, which is the one-signal law for sound — and the score is written as text, with ↑ and ↓ for the register and [brackets] for the overlay.
The plan's test for every flourish — snick sounds named first — is whether it demonstrates the system or decorates it. Three checks, each of which a decoration would fail, applied to this study as the clock applied them to itself.
| Check | Ask | Result |
|---|---|---|
| countable | can the sound be counted back to the grid? | yes: a note is a column, a register is a row band, a chord is a span, a buzz is a sliver; the score is written as text and the table gives every frequency |
| structural | does it sound something the eye cannot see? | the beat of the sliver — the near-miss as a frequency, f/35 hertz — is the interference heard rather than seen; the editions narrowing the scale is the editions narrowing the grid |
| withholdable | can it be withheld without loss? | yes: silent by default, nothing on load or scroll, the score legible without it; the system loses nothing when the sound is off, which is the plan's reason to keep it Composer-only |
The seed said five strings, and the first thing the study had to do was find them. A seven-column grid has seven columns, and a composer's instinct is to tune all seven and call it a scale; but two of those columns carry a sliver — the microcolumn where the base grid and the overlay grid nearly coincide — and the system has never let a sliver be ordinary. So the sliver columns are not clean strings. They are pairs: two plucks a microcolumn apart in pitch, which is a thirty-fifth, and two strings a thirty-fifth apart beat against each other at a rate you can count. That leaves five clean strings, and five clean strings that must sound well together in any combination are a pentatonic scale, which is what the seed suggested before the count was made. The grid narrows and the scale narrows with it: three clean strings at 5×3 are a triad, two at 3×2 are a fifth. Nothing was decided but the first note.
The rest was already in the studio. Rows as the register came from the clock, where rows were hours. A block as a chord came from the engine's own vocabulary — a block spans columns, so it sounds the strings it spans — and a composition read in DOM order came from the plan's rule that reading order stays sane, which turns out to be a rule about music too: the assembly figure, base plane first and breakouts after, is a sequence, and played at the Circuit's tempo it lasts about as long as the assembly takes. The one-signal law became monophony: one block or one pulse sounds at a time, and the sounding one carries the colour. And the plan's warning held the study to the clock's test. Sound here is countable, it sounds something the eye cannot see — the beat of the near-miss — and it can be withheld without loss. It is an instrument. It is also, as the plan said from the start, for the Composer and not for the public page, and the study agrees.
Sixth study of the night; the draw taken with the date suffixed. Five sentences:
Stage A · seeded composition · blocks are inserted in reading order, so DOM order stays sane for screen readersanswered as law 4: a composition is read as rhythm in DOM order — reading order is playing order, base plane first, breakouts after
Contributes: memorability, the "dashboard elements and micro-animation" energy from your notes, warmth.answered in the timbre: every note is a plucked string with a low-pass in its loop, warm and decaying, never an organ
Text blocks, service cards, stats, navigation: base grid, plane 0, opaque.answered as law 1 and 2: the base grid's columns are the strings with the buzzes in them; the overlay's are the second voice without
Rather than three competing looks, these are three layers of ambition extrapolated from your notes and the comps.considered: the plan's three directions; the sound belongs to Direction C's instrument-panel register
Signal cyan #00C0EC Exactly one signal moment per viewport — the block that just clicked in.answered as law 6: the block that just sounded is the block that just clicked in; it carries the signal while it rings, and only one rings at a time
draw.js| Constant | Value | Why |
|---|---|---|
| strings | base columns · sliver columns = beating pairs (f, f × 36/35) · clean columns = pentatonic / triad / fifth | law 1: the near-miss is heard; the editions narrow the scale |
| tonic | C4 · 261.63 Hz · degrees 0 2 4 7 9 semitones | the one thing tuned by hand |
| buzz | the geometric mean of the neighbouring degrees · beat = f / 35 Hz | a note between the scale's notes, beating at the sliver's own ratio |
| overlay | overlay columns = the same degrees, no buzz · shorter (0.7 s), brighter (6 kHz) | law 2: two grids, two voices |
| register | rows in three bands · ×2, ×1, ×½ | law 3: the clock's rows as hours, here as octaves |
| chord | a block's columns strummed 20 ms apart at its row's register | law 4 |
| tempo | 220 ms per block or per column | law 5: the Circuit's beat, one row per beat |
| string | Karplus–Strong: 20 ms noise burst → delay 1/f → low-pass 4.2 kHz → feedback g = 0.001^(1/(f·dur)) · dur 1.6 s · compressor on the master | law 7: strings from the browser's own nodes |
| silence | no AudioContext until the switch · play refused and counted while off · hidden document stops | law 8: the charter's opt-in, kept to the letter |
| feed/score | script: data-note, data-hz, data-beat, data-sounding, data-score, data-notes, data-buzzed, data-chords, data-ms, data-refused · stylesheet: strings, the sounding block, the pulse | law 9 |