Wodnesdaeg

Wōdnesdæg is sixty-four sine waves tuned to one chord and left to ring. Nothing is triggered, nothing decays. The instrument is the chord itself, and what you hear is the beating between waves.

Two banks of sixty-four sliders run across the screen. The upper bank is how loud each wave is. The lower bank is how far each wave sits off its own note. Sitting exactly on the note, sixty-four waves have nothing to beat against and the chord is flat. Move one and a slow pulse appears. Move twenty and the chord starts to breathe.

TEMPER sets the tuning system, so the same chord can be equal-tempered, just, or anything between — and the difference is audible immediately, because sustained sine waves show a tuning system more plainly than any other sound.

Choose key, scale and how the chord is stacked. Set the spread of each band. PLAY steps the music through a sequence; the microphone can step it too, listening for a clap or a voice in the room. Load a sound file into the deck and layer another over it, mixed by addition, wave-folding, ring modulation or bitwise XOR.

At the output: tape wear with independent wow and flutter per channel, reverb, compressor, limiter and EQ.

Landscape only. Everything happens on the device: no accounts, no network, no analytics. The microphone measures loudness only and records nothing. Headphones or a decent speaker recommended — much of this instrument is in the low end.