CROSS-MODAL PLAYGROUND / 001 — LOCAL FIRST
What if a sentence had a silhouette? What if your rhythm cast a colour? This is a working instrument for translating signals between senses—by rules you can inspect and change.
ENTER THE INSTRUMENT ↘01 / THE INSTRUMENT
Letter codes, word count and punctuation change the geometry. Nothing leaves your browser.
Tap, click, or press keys 1–4 while this panel is active. Each beat adds energy; silence lets it decay.
0 beats captured · rhythm awaits
Microphone access is requested only when you press Start microphone. Raw audio is analysed locally, never recorded or uploaded. Requires HTTPS/localhost and browser permission.
Microphone off. Text and rhythm work without it.
Prism maps energy to angular petals and brightness; hue follows the signal fingerprint.
Volume is only used after explicit sound opt-in. No audio autoplay.
Pin a snapshot, change a source or preset, and inspect both visual outcomes together.
Exports stay on this device.
A violet angular bloom made from the phrase. It expands with energy and repeats around a central point.
02 / UNDER THE HOOD
Text produces a repeatable numerical fingerprint from Unicode code points, length, words and punctuation. Rhythm uses recent pad strikes, pitch classes and timing. The microphone reads signal amplitude and a rough frequency centroid, not speech content.
Each preset uses a different visual grammar. Prism is faceted and bright; Tide uses fluid loops; Orbit builds nested rings. Energy drives scale and movement, complexity drives density, and fingerprint or frequency selects colour.
Synesthesia describes real variations in sensory experience, often involving consistent inducer–concurrent associations. This page is an artistic mapping experiment, not a clinical test, a replica of anyone’s experience, or proof of universal sound–colour laws.
REPRODUCIBILITY NOTE — Text and saved recipes are deterministic. Rhythm and live microphone capture are time-dependent inputs; their displayed features are sampled locally. Microphone analysis is approximate and varies by device, room and browser.
03 / FIELDWORK
Compose “We are here.” and pin it. Change the full stop to an exclamation mark. Observe which features shift. Does the outcome feel emotionally different because of geometry—or because you already read the punctuation as excited?
Keep the phrase fixed; pin Prism and select Tide. The input does not change, but the rendering does. This demonstrates how translation choices create meaning rather than discovering an inherent colour in a word.
In rhythm mode, tap four evenly spaced beats, then try an uneven sequence. Compare pacing and density. Consider whether the space between beats carries more character than the beats alone.
04 / TAKE THE LAB HOME
Original explanations, tested mapping thought experiments, journaling prompts, cautions and further reading. Designed for offline reflection—not scientific certification.