Twelve imaginary landscapes to drift through, and a place to listen in. A generative cinema studio that runs entirely in your browser: slow images drawn in real time, and a sound that is itself a place.
Twelve worlds, at their first composition. Everything is computed in your browser: no images, no samples, no models, no network.
You need Python 3 (to serve the files locally) and a browser with WebGL 2 and Web Audio: Chrome or Safari.
On a Mac: double-click Run ORBITE.command. It prints the local address and opens it in Chrome. Keep its Terminal window open while you drift; close it, or press Ctrl+C, to stop. See the first-opening guide if macOS asks you to confirm.
On macOS or Linux: python3 scripts/serve.py, then open the address it prints (it prefers port 4240).
Press Listen to the orbit: browsers wait for a click before making sound.
- Twelve destinations, and A new elsewhere draws a place that never existed: its name, form, sky, light and palette come from nested grammars, and the same seed always draws the same place.
- Glide, the default camera, is a continuous, patient drift forward. The landscape never runs out: the next crystals, islands, arches, peaks or slabs are always a little different from the last. Six other cameras (drift, forward, rising diagonal, orbit, slow zoom, panoramic crane) and a random one that blends them.
- Moving the pointer shifts your view. Drift sets the pace, film grain the texture, resonance how much the sound lights the image, and six tints (original, cyanotype, amber, silver, dawn, night) regrade the whole picture.
- Changing place is never a cut: the old picture dissolves into the new one.
The sound is Loopra Stage: thirty-two independent loops, each repeating at its own length, in one shared key and mode. Every world brings its own key, its own space and its own selection of layers.
- A place, not a mix. Each layer sits at its own distance, from at your ears (dry, bright, a little to one side on headphones) to on the horizon (dark, washed in a very large reverberation). Staging sets how far apart they stand, Walking lets them drift nearer and farther over minutes, Space goes from a small room to a vast hall.
- No pass is the same take. With Variation up, every repetition of a loop is a little earlier or later, softer or louder, in a different position. The seed makes it reproducible.
- The sounds are visible. Each sounding layer glows in the landscape at its own distance: near ones large and soft, far ones small and sharp, near the horizon.
- The harmonic pad is the foundation. It has a level of its own, starting at 50 % so that it does not mask the other layers, and sits first in the list.
- Silk & light starts quiet. This sustained veil of high notes almost never stops, so it starts at 12 % of its old level; it is still an ordinary on/off layer.
- Mute any layer, draw new loop lengths, change the musical mode, enrich the harmony, or trigger a portamento call.
- Or drop your own music (MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG or FLAC, up to 256 MB) onto the studio. It loops and stays in the browser.
- Save this stop keeps the place, seed, camera, view, settings, layers and loop lengths in a notebook of up to 60 stops, which exports and imports as JSON.
- 4K image: a 3,840 × 2,160 PNG without the interface.
- Film 24 seconds: a 1,920 × 1,080 film with two discreet titles and the live sound. MP4 (H.264) when the browser can, WebM otherwise. Keep the tab visible while it records.
Shortcuts: Space pause the image, M sound, S surprise, F fullscreen, 1 – 9, 0, − = destination.
Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, no build step, no dependency. WebGL 2 draws each landscape by ray marching, one small program per world, compiled the first time it is needed. Web Audio synthesizes every sound; a seeded random generator makes every room and every take reproducible.
dist/index.html, style.css the studio
dist/app.js state, notebook, exports, the loop of frames
dist/renderer.js the landscapes, cameras and dissolves (WebGL 2)
dist/worlds.js the twelve worlds, their sound places, the grammars
dist/sound.js the link to Loopra Stage
dist/loopra/ Loopra Stage: audio.js, space.js, timbre.js, rng.js
scripts/serve.py the small local server
Settings and the notebook stay in your browser's local storage, which belongs to the address you open. Export the notebook before clearing site data.
- WebGL 2 and graphics acceleration are required. The picture adapts its resolution to the speed it measures.
- Film export depends on the video codecs of your browser. 4K images are rendered on the spot and can take a moment.
- This is a live instrument: it does not record a performance of its sound, only the 24-second films.
- Tested in Chrome on a Mac mini M4 Pro. Safari and Firefox have not been tested.
Jean-Pascal — Quick-Eyed Sky on YouTube, QES on Hugging Face. Not a programmer: this exists for the pleasure of drifting through places that do not exist, with a sound that is a place too.
The sound engine is Loopra. The idea of slow loops that never realign owes a debt to Brian Eno's Music for Airports and Thursday Afternoon.
If it gives you a quiet afternoon, you can buy me a coffee. Entirely optional, and ORBITE stays exactly as free either way.
MIT — see LICENSE. You can use, modify and share it under those terms.