Curator's Notes
How the museum was built
One page, no recordings, no media files. Four extinct sounds raised from pure synthesis, in a hall of ink, brass and vitrine glass.
The concept
RELIQUARY is a fictional museum of extinct sounds — the rotary dial, the dial-up handshake, the typewriter, the 16 mm projector — presented as a dark-academia exhibition hall for anyone old enough to miss them and young enough never to have heard them. The page has a single job: make you press listen, then show you that what you heard was not a recording but a performance, synthesized from a score at the moment you asked.
Palette
black-brown of closed stacks; warmer than pure black
plaques, engravings, every instrument line
highlights, links, the lit edge of a plaque
label stock; body copy at 12:1 contrast on Archive
the oscilloscope trace — warm gold, not oscilloscope green, so the instrument belongs to the museum
a cool tint over each specimen; the only cold note in the room, which is what glass is
Type
Playfair Display carries the museum voice — high-contrast Didone display for the enormous letterspaced RELIQUARY, the engraved small-caps plaques, and every eyebrow. Crimson Text is the label copy: a bookish old-style serif with true italics for programmes, captions and ledger notes. The one deliberate flourish: the hero and eyebrow set U as V (MVSEVM OF EXTINCT SOVNDS), the way institutions carve themselves into stone.
Techniques
- WebAudio synthesis (the signature). Every sound is scheduled on a single
AudioContextcreated only on the first Listen press. Each exhibit is a "programme" — a function that schedules oscillators, filtered noise bursts and gain envelopes against the context clock and returns its own duration. The rotary dial is a pulse train: per digit, a ratchet wind-up of bandpassed noise ticks, then N make/break click pairs at 10 pulses per second under a governor whirr, book-ended by a two-tone dial tone (350+440 Hz) and ringback (440+480 Hz). The dial-up handshake walks the real choreography — DTMF pairs, 2100 Hz answer tone with phase-reversal gaps, 2225/1270 Hz marks, randomly-keyed FSK warble, swept bandpass probe chirps, then the wideband hiss of an open connection. The typewriter throws a three-layer strike (highpass snap, ~700 Hz thock, low body knock) with humanised timing that is never the same twice, a two-partial margin bell with exponential decay, and a carriage-return zip. The projector runs two beating sawtooth motors through a lowpass, sprocket clatter as 24 Hz square-LFO-modulated noise, 48 Hz shutter flutter, and ends with the film tail flapping free. - Canvas oscilloscopes. Each exhibit's output chain passes through its own
AnalyserNode; a shared rAF loop draws the time-domain trace with a rising-edge trigger (so periodic tones hold still) onto a graticuled canvas, with translucent-fill phosphor persistence so the trace decays like a real CRT. DPR capped at 2, resized byResizeObserver, paused onvisibilitychange. - SVG engravings. All four specimens are hand-placed inline SVG line drawings in brass stroke with a shared 45° hatch pattern — no raster anywhere. The modem's carrier-detect LEDs blink and the projector reels spin only while their exhibit is sounding.
- Vitrine glass. Layered CSS gradients tint each display case; a pointer-tracked radial glare (CSS variables, rAF-throttled, fine-pointer only) makes the glass move as you walk past.
- No libraries. The concept needed none — fonts are the only external resource.
Iteration log
Pass 1 — Craft
Plaque catalogue lines wrapped to an orphaned year and sat too low-contrast on the brass; shortened the metadata ("in service" cut, model names tightened), reduced tracking, and darkened the engraving ink to #3B2D19. The roman-numeral watermark leaked above the card into the hall rule — pulled from -.55em to -.28em. Vitrine captions lifted from #6E5836 to #96794C to survive the glass gradient.
Pass 2 — Depth
Gave the scopes phosphor persistence (translucent fill instead of clear, so traces decay like a CRT). Added the aftermath note: when a programme ends naturally the exhibit whispers "extinct again —" for three seconds — the thesis in one micro-interaction. Listen buttons got a .965 press-scale so the turnstile has weight.
Pass 3 — Hardening
Verified zero horizontal overflow at 375px (measured, not eyeballed). Moved the scroll-reveal opacity behind an html.js gate so exhibits are never invisible without JavaScript. Reduced motion kills the hero rise, card reveals, reel spin and LED blink in CSS, and JS checks matchMedia before wiring the glare tracker; scopes only ever animate on an explicit Listen. Chanel rule: removed the centre dot from the hero waveform engraving. Final copy read: tightened plaque metadata across all four exhibits.
Return visit
Second-read details for those who come back: the deaccession ledger's final entry is not a dagger but a recovery — the rotary dial, restored to Hall I. The typewriter has never typed the same line twice. And the museum's namesake is in the ledger too, still lost: the coin return, brass on brass.