Sound
Sound written by Krissy Hall
Four voices, one for each point. Nothing here is a recording, and nothing here was taken from anyone else’s music.
What you are hearing
Four voices share one scale and one clock. They never play the same phrase twice, because each voice takes a small random step through the scale on every entry and is bounded so it can never wander far. That is why it stays coherent without ever repeating.
They are built out of oscillators, filters and two feedback delay lines, assembled in your browser when you press play. There is no MP3 on this site. There is no streaming request. If you disconnect from the network after the page loads, it still plays.
North · Earth
Two detuned sawtooth oscillators an octave below the root, plus a sine at the root, through a low-pass filter that breathes open and closed once every twenty-two seconds.
East · Voice
A long sine tone with a quiet octave above it. The vibrato is not there at the start — it arrives about halfway through the note, the way it does when a singer holds one.
South · Pulse
A hand drum: a sine that falls in pitch as it decays, with a short filtered noise transient on top for the skin. Hard on the downbeat, soft between.
West · Flute
A triangle wave that bends up into each note from the scale degree below, riding on band-passed noise for breath. It plays twice in every eight beats and never on the downbeat.
Why the credit is on every page
The photographs, films and songs on this site were made by four other people, and every one of them is credited to whoever made it. The sound is the one thing here that is not theirs — it was written for this site by Krissy Hall, and it is signed so that there is never any doubt which is which.
If you would rather not hear it
Nothing plays until you press play. There is no autoplay anywhere on this site, and no page makes a sound on load.