Interactive design · Interactive collection
Sound Toys
Ten playable Web Audio instruments that share one rule: pitch sets hue, and register and loudness set saturation and brightness.
- Role
- Design & development
- Period
- 2026
- Status
- Live
- Platform
- Cloudflare Pages
- Built with
- JavaScript
- Web Audio API
- Canvas
- 10
- instruments
- 11,714
- lines of code
- 26
- commits
01
One color rule
Every instrument in the set colors sound the same way. The pitch of a note sets its hue, its register sets saturation, and its loudness sets brightness, so the same note looks the same wherever it appears.
Pitch to color
Each of the twelve pitch classes has a fixed hue, shared by every instrument.
02
The instruments
- A theremin, beat frequencies, and Karplus-Strong plucked strings.
- IPA vowel formants and a Doppler model.
- A resonance study, an acoustic field simulation, and animal hearing ranges shifted into the human range.
- A live spectrum analyzer that drives a radial pitch wheel, an oscilloscope, and a spectrogram.