Colophon · Model Æ-1
THEREMIN is a real Web Audio synthesiser dressed as Léon Theremin's 1920 aetherphone. The page is dark and silent until you move; then your cursor becomes a hand in the field — pitch to the right by the antenna, volume in your height, vibrato in the tremor of your movement. A live Chladni sand-plate draws the standing wave of whatever note you are holding. It is built for the curious visitor who has never been allowed to touch the instrument in the museum case.
Argued from the object: brown Bakelite, a warm valve glow, and the mint phosphor of an oscilloscope trace. Following the collection's ink/line rule, the bright accents are reserved for marks and light — the antenna, the glowing digits, the sand — while all running prose sits on a dedicated warm off-white so nothing small ever drops below readable contrast on the dark stage.
Text tokens: ink #ECE2CC, dim #B6A98B, mute #867B64 — a three-step warm-neutral ramp so prose, labels and captions stay separable without ever borrowing the accent hues.
A single-weight geometric condensed face with a slightly mechanical, early-broadcast feel. Set wide-tracked for the wordmark and the two-line headline; its one voice keeps the display disciplined.
Tabular figures that don't jitter as the pitch races. It carries every label, the live readout panel, and all running copy — instrument-panel plainness against the display's flourish.
Driving the instrument headless caught a real defect: the Chladni modes ran backwards — low notes drew more lines than high ones, contradicting the physics and this very page's copy. Re-tied the mode count to pitch-normal so higher notes multiply the lines. Then tuned the type scale (Unica One wordmark tracking to .30em; readout digits to a tabular 1.02rem) and pulled the readout panel onto its own translucent Bakelite scrim so mono labels never sit on the raw animated field. Rebalanced the sand colour so node grains read mint and agitated grains fall back to dim brass — the figure now separates from the noise. Lifted the mute label token to clear 4.5:1 on the dark panels, and rewrote the three "how it works" blocks into specific, dated copy (heterodyne, 1920, 3/2) instead of adjectives.
Enriched the signature: added the gradient-descent term so figures resolve crisply within the screenshot settle instead of merely diffusing, and drove the lowpass cutoff from pitch and volume so loud high notes brighten. Added two second-read details — the antenna's engraved maker's mark Л. ТЕРМЕН · 1920 surfacing only when your cursor is close enough for the highest notes, and the readout's just-intonation lamp lighting when you hold within six cents of a pure rung. Micro-movement now feeds vibrato depth, so a jittery hand actually warbles.
Rebuilt the 375 px layout: readout docked to the safe-area bottom, hero copy moved above it, stage trimmed to 82svh so the "physics" section peeks and touch users aren't trapped on the play surface (a scroll affordance jumps them down). Verified :focus-visible rings, the reduced-motion static path, and the visibility-pause. Removed one ornament — an earlier second glowing "volume floor" line that competed with the loop — per the keep-one-thing rule.
Designed & built by Sapience Analytics — part of the Generative Assets collection. No audio is recorded; the sound is synthesised live in your browser.