The Hour That Came Back

There are no recordings hiding under the leaves. Every note is synthesized at the moment you hear it with the browser's Web Audio API. Each garden bed creates two oscillators: a fundamental tone and a quieter overtone. Quality and recovery use round sine waves; learning uses a slightly reedier triangle wave; refusal rings briefly, then leaves room behind it.

The gain envelopes rise for 35 milliseconds and fall away exponentially, which removes the sharp click an oscillator would make if it simply appeared at full volume. A low-pass filter softens the upper frequencies. The allocation sliders become a weighted score: every 1.25 seconds the garden chooses from the destinations receiving time. When refusal is chosen, every other turn is deliberately silent.

Early PC sound made the hardware itself part of the creative constraint. The original Sound Blaster arrived in 1989, and fixed FM-synthesis chips helped define early-1990s game audio. Creative's history and the Computer History Museum trace that path from dedicated cards and Yamaha FM chips. Today, ordinary page code can assemble a portable synthesizer as a graph of software nodes, and the browser schedules the signal in real time.

The hardware did not disappear. A built-in codec, USB interface, or Bluetooth device still performs the final conversion from digital signal to something a speaker can move through the air. What changed is the authoring surface: this little instrument is delivered as text over the web, built when you press a button, and discarded when the tab closes.