◎ ORBITAL / 01
AN EXPERIMENT IN GRAVITY & SOUND
A GENERATIVE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

A universe you can play.

Move a little gravity. Hear what happens.

01 / SHAPE YOUR WORLD◌
COMPOSE THE MOTION

Ready · press Begin listening

4/4 time. Structure increases the share of encounters aligned to eighth notes and current chord tones. Chords are built from the selected scale; five-note scales wrap the progression degrees. At 0%, the original free ambient behavior returns. Changing musical settings restarts the phrase.

UNIVERSE IN MOTION · SOUND OFFSEED 008128
CURRENT WORLD

Nebula

Slow orbits. Soft bells. A place to disappear.

CLICK TO PLACE GRAVITY · DRAG TO BEND ORBITS
32PARTICLES
0ENCOUNTERS
—LAST NOTE
03 / CHOREOGRAPH GRAVITY

Choose Orbit or Wander per well. Motion can be paused individually; Freeze pauses all motion.

Click the field to place up to six wells. Drag a well to set its position and orbit radius.

NOT A LOOP. A LIVING SYSTEM.

Close encounters become notes.
Every gesture changes what comes next.

Synthesized live in your browser. No samples, no microphone.
THE OBSERVATION LAB

What makes a universe sing?

Compare eight worlds with the same seed.

THE FIELD GUIDE

Play the space between.

Press Begin listening to unlock audio. Start at a comfortable volume; headphones reveal the stereo movement.

01 / Attract

Click the universe to place up to six gravity wells. Choose Orbit or Wander beneath the field for each well. Orbit keeps a circular path; Wander slowly moves between random destinations. Use the motion button to pause that well. Each orbit keeps its starting radius; dragging sets a new radius. A well placed exactly at the center stays there. Freeze pauses orbits too. Right-click to remove a nearby well, or use Clear gravity.

02 / Disturb

Send a pulse to push particles outward. Enable Auto pulse and set its rate from 2 to 60 pulses per minute. Automatic pulses pause when frozen or when the tab is hidden. Freeze holds the physics while existing notes decay. Change worlds for a different starting character. Use Particles to add or remove particles live, from 8 to 48.

03 / Listen

Musical mode adds a 40–160 BPM clock in 4/4. Structure controls the proportion of encounters snapped to eighth notes and mapped to the current chord. Four scale-derived progressions change chords every 2, 4, or 8 bars. The enabled drone follows these chords and the scale root; its manual chord and root return when Musical mode is off or Structure is zero. Pause listening restarts the phrase; Freeze stops encounters while the harmonic clock continues. Automatic pulses keep their separate rate.

Choose from nine synthesized encounter voices, including a guqin-inspired plucked string, Kalimba, Celesta, Singing Bowl, Warm Pad, and the original Orbital voice. These are synthesized voices. Changes apply to new notes; existing notes fade naturally. Encounters play notes from 13 scales. Enable the separate Chord Drone for a sustained warm chord underneath, with its own root, octave (−2 to +2), chord type, level, and eight sustained voices. Abyss, Rusted Cathedral, and Spectral Fog are dark ambient options. Encounter sound chance applies a 1–100% probability before the voice and rate limits; it does not affect the drone. The three Japanese options use common equal-tempered scale-book forms; traditional tunings vary. A voice limit keeps dense clusters musical. Delay, reverb, and brightness affect encounters only; the drone bypasses these effects. Delay sets echo spacing from 0 to 5 seconds; Reverb sets the reverb tail from 0 to 5 seconds. Zero turns the respective effect off; the instrument’s natural ring remains. Higher particles play higher notes; left and right become stereo position. Faster encounters play louder.

04 / Capture

Record up to two minutes of stereo WAV. Stop to download. Save world stores the current particles and settings in this browser; Restore brings them back.

Space: sound on/off · P: pulse · F: freeze · Delete: remove last well. Keyboard shortcuts work outside form controls. The universe is a musical simulation, not a model of astrophysics. Sound requires the page to remain active.

THE OBSERVATION LAB

Same seed. Different laws.

Each world runs for 30 simulated wall-clock seconds, at 60 steps per second. No audio is generated by this experiment.

Encounters count eligible close approaches, before the audio engine’s rate and voice limits. Clustering is the final share of particle pairs less than 0.15 world units apart. Speed is in world units per simulation second. Presets vary several controls and particle count, so this compares complete worlds, not isolated causes.