Acoustics & Music Theory
why it sounds like that
How this site is made

What can be heard

This is the only one of these essay collections whose subject is directly available to a reader's senses in a browser. This page says how far that goes — which figures make a noise, which do not, and why the difference is a rule rather than an accident.

Nothing on this site is a recording. Every sound is additive synthesis in the browser, built from the same numbers that produced the picture beside it — one declaration, two outputs, so a caption, a drawn frequency and a synthesised pitch cannot drift apart. A figure that can be heard costs a few dozen extra bytes in a data attribute; the synthesiser itself is loaded once and shared across every page.

3223 of the 3225 figures in the essays carry sound, offering 7324 buttons between them, from 147 of the 147 generators. Those numbers are measured rather than declared: each generator is called with the options its placement actually passes and asked what it returns, so a generator that can speak but was handed nothing to say is counted here as silent.

The proportion is high enough to be worth a warning. The sound corroborates and never carries. Every argument here is complete and true for a reader who never presses a button — on a train, at work, on a device with no audio — and the picture is the evidence. A comma is a ratio whether or not anybody hears it beat. What the sound adds is a second, independent line of the same evidence, which matters most in the places where a picture is genuinely weak: a cent is a fiftieth of the gap between two piano keys and invisible at any honest scale, and a drawn waveform at 440 Hz is a solid black band.

Nothing plays unasked and nothing loops. Every button says what it will do before it does it — "Major third, just" and "Major third, equal", never a bare triangle — because a control whose label is a symbol makes the reader press it to find out, which is the beginning of autoplay by another route.

The claims that are only drawn

2 of 3225

Most of the silent figures have something to play and were drawn before anybody wrote it. A sound has to be designed from the same numbers as the picture, and for a run of the newest essays that second half was skipped, until whole essays went out with nothing to press. They are being given their sounds now, newest essays first, and every new essay has to let its reader hear at least half of its figures.

Two figures are silent by design, and both for a reason worth stating.

The comma table drawn by edo-map in nineteen, thirty-one and fifty-three plots how much each division of the octave tempers each of three commas. Its subject is a quantity of error rather than a pitch, and there is no note in it to play: the honest sound for that figure would be one of the intervals it is about, which the essay's other figures already offer.

The stave in rhythm is a circle writes a rhythm on a single repeated pitch. The stave generator can play a phrase, but it plays it as a sequence at a uniform gap — it voices the note heads and not the durations — so a rhythm played through it would contradict the picture it sits under. That is a limit of the generator rather than of the argument, and it is recorded here rather than papered over, because the failure the rule exists to prevent is exactly a sound that disagrees with its own figure.

By generator

audible placements, and the buttons each offers

By essay

490 of 490 essays carry at least one

All figures · All essays