Sweet Sixteen

Twelve circles, one pentatonic scale, and a sixteen-bar loop that remembers what you played into it. Tap a circle and it rings. Start recording and every tap is kept, on the nearest beat, going round until you clear it.

What it does

Every circle is one note of a C major pentatonic, spread over three octaves and three voices: five bells at the bottom, four pads in the middle, three plucks on top. A pentatonic has no interval in it that can sound wrong against another, so whatever gets played, in whatever order, holds together. That is the whole trick behind the calm.

The loop is sixteen bars of four, just under a minute at the tempo it opens on. Press record and the hand starts going round; every tap is written to the dial at the nearest eighth note, so a phrase that was slightly late lands on the beat anyway. It keeps recording as it comes round again, so the loop is built in passes: the low bells first, then a pad under them, then whatever the top three are for. Undo takes back the last note, clear empties the dial, and dragging the ring itself moves the playhead, so a bar in the middle can be worked on without waiting for it.

The list on the left loads sixteen bars at a time. Happy Clouds is the one that was played rather than written: a hundred and two taps at 96, kept exactly where they landed, which is what this page is for. Ballad is the shape of an eighties one, a picked figure on every offbeat with the bass alternating under it and four long notes holding over the top. The last two sit at opposite ends of what twelve circles can be asked for. Lullaby is in C and slow: three notes at a time at most, whole bars where only the chord is holding, and a tune that crosses out of the pads into the top three as it climbs, so it brightens without anything getting louder. Phase leans on A minor, which is the same five notes read from the other end, and on a figure that plays every three sixteenths against a bar of four, so it never lands twice in the same place; it builds, drops away to nothing for two bars, and comes back. Record over either, or clear it and start again.

Nothing is stored anywhere. The whole loop, the tempo and every note on it, lives in the URL, and it is written there as you play, so the address bar is always the thing on the dial. Share only copies it for you. The only way any of it survives is if somebody sends it to somebody.

The sound is built in the browser out of oscillators, with a reverb made on the spot from a couple of seconds of decaying noise. There are no samples to download and nothing to wait for. Every note that sounds opens a bloom of its own colour behind the page, spreading until it has the whole screen and holding at a tenth of itself on the way out, which is the only thing here that shows how long a note lasts.

The circles came from the orbit edition, where they are in motion and ring as they are caught. Back to the playground →