Deep, slowly evolving sound — and how to bend it toward what you want.
Tap the orb. That's the whole requirement — it picks somewhere calm and begins.
If you'd rather choose, the band at the bottom of the first screen asks what do you need, and you can pick how long it should last and where it should happen.
Best with headphones, at low volume, somewhere quiet. Several of the effects are built out of the small differences between your two ears, and a speaker collapses them.
Two choices, not one: a shape and a place.
The shape is the arc over time — whether the sound holds steady, winds down, or dissolves to silence. The place is the scenery it happens in. Any shape works over any place, so "sleep, in the night forest" is a sentence you assemble rather than an item on a list.
stay | The place as it is, going on as long as you like. |
unwind | Arrive busy, leave slow — with a gentle return, so you come back rather than drop off. |
sleep | A one-way dissolve. It ends in real silence and does not bring you back. |
reset | A few minutes to take an anxious body and leave it steady. |
breathe | Paced breathing. The orb leads and the sound swells with it. |
Once something is playing, choosing a different place moves you rather than starting over — whatever arc you're in carries on in the new scenery, over about twelve seconds.
The panel above the drawer is two dials. The arrow keys move them, and the row of words along the top chooses what they're connected to.
| depth | ↕ pitch | ↔ voices | how low it sits · how much is playing |
| space | ↕ width | ↔ distance | how wide it is · how far away |
| motion | ↕ pulse | ↔ drift | how fast it breathes · how much it wanders |
| colour | ↕ brightness | ↔ richness | how bright it is · how dense |
| echo | ↕ amount | ↔ length | how much comes back · how long the tail |
So: press 2 for space, then hold ↑ to open the sound out around you. Press Tab to walk through the modes if you'd rather not remember numbers. Every dial has a − and + button too, so none of this needs a keyboard.
Nothing here can break anything. The dials have limits built in, and starting a new session puts everything back.
The panel names the voice playing right now — something like kalimba · pattern · climb. That's so there's no doubt what you're reacting to when several things are sounding at once.
| x | Something else. That voice gets a different figure to play, straight away. Melodies repeat for a long time on purpose — this is how you move one along when it has outstayed its welcome. |
| . | Keep this. Remembers that voice on this device and marks it kept in the panel. |
Both are also buttons in the panel. Keeping is stored on your device only — there is no account and nothing is sent anywhere.
| ↑ ↓ | move the first dial of the current mode |
| ← → | move the second dial |
| 1 – 5 | jump straight to a mode |
| Tab | step through the modes in order |
| x | something else — a different figure for the voice playing now |
| . | keep this — remember the voice playing now |
| L | the rack: every control there is |
| V / W | other ways of seeing the sound |
| Esc | close everything |
The drawer at the bottom opens in two stages: tap it for the session's controls — how long, how it feels, whether there's a melody — and open it fully for the library of places and journeys. On a phone, swiping across the screen travels to the next place.
L opens the rack, which is every parameter the sound is made of. It is deliberately the last door, and nothing in it is required.
Once in a while, after a session that actually ran a while, you'll be asked whether it worked and what would make it better. It never appears while something is playing, and at most once a fortnight.
If you answer, your rating and anything you type go to the person who makes this, along with which place you were in and how long you listened. There's no account, no tracking across sites, and nothing that identifies you.