About Willowmere

A lullaby in the manner of Satie, on a slow river, drawn entirely in text.

• Touch anywhere. A feather drifts down out of the air, landing on a beat as a petal. Left is low, right is high. Touch the water and the note sounds at once. Touch the land and the feather carries the note: it comes straight down (or up, from the near bank) to the river below your finger, a beat or two later, and the note sounds when it hits, on the beat, in the key of that moment. Either way it rings until its petal sinks.
• One feather a beat. Touch again sooner than that and the note hums softly in the background instead, a tone under the piano, and no feather falls.
• The wind has a say. It leans the willow and pushes falling feathers sideways, so a feather can land a note over from where you let go. The touch is your note, the echo is the wind’s. Now and then a gust comes through: it streams the willow and the grass, roughens the water, pushes the petals across it, breathes in the hall, and at its height it shakes a leaf loose. The wind moves the chords too.
• The river holds. The petals afloat are the sustain pedal. The rocking chords underneath take their colour from whatever is still on the water.
• Stir the water. A touch is a soft note and a ripple that shoves the petals near it. Drag and your hand leaves a wake that carries the petals it passes and strums them. Gather them, scatter them, push them through the moonlight.
• The world keeps the pulse. Every bass note the willow breathes: it brightens and its curtain swings out and back. On each chord a few fireflies flash together.
• Rocks are bells. The river winds between rocks, and each is tuned to the chord: the big ones low on the root, the middling ones on the fifth, the small ones high on the third, and a line of stepping stones climbs the chord across the river. Touch one and it rings. A petal that drifts into one knocks it, on the beat. The current parts round every rock and turns back in the eddy behind, so a petal can linger there.
• The willow moves the chords. Every leaf that lands brings the next chord of the Gymnopédie itself, bar by bar, with its own turns into G and C major in the middle, so its C and F naturals come from the tree. Touch the tree to shake a leaf loose, or let it go on its own. The left hand plays a low bass note, then one chord held, as Satie wrote it.
• The piece breathes. Eight bars to a phrase: a swell into the fifth bar, a stretch at the end, and every second phrase closes with a bar of bass alone.
• The moon is the key. Touch it and the whole piece drops a fifth, round the flat side of the circle, so the key darkens as the moon wanes. The drop lands with the bass on the next downbeat. Until then the moon hums the new note and throbs, and as the key lands it wanes a phase and its path on the water glints. The moon stays where it is. Twelve touches and it is full again, back in D.
• The moon plays them back. A petal drifting through the moon’s reflection sounds again, softly. Deep ones come back an octave down.
• A crowd walks. Three or more petals in one spot and on each chord beat one of them steps to a neighbouring note, with a little mordent, or a turn in the Gnossienne. Leave a crowd alone and it wanders.
• The river is rationed. Whatever it plays back on its own, glints, strums, sighs and the crowd, lands on the beat, no more than twice a bar, and it waits a beat after you touch the sky.
• You can see where every sound comes from. Each clump of wildflowers is tuned to a note and opens when its note is in the chord. Every cricket you hear is a cricket hopping in the grass, heard from where it sits. Every plip in the river is a bubble breaking with a small ring. Two moths circle the moon’s reflection and light up when it sounds.
• Fireflies live on the near bank. They wander, and they are drawn to the notes: a firefly that finds a petal circles it and flashes each time that note sounds in a chord, so the pedal is a little constellation. Touch the bank and the ones nearby scatter and flash, and the nearest gives a note, very high and very soft, on the river’s grid.
• Leave it alone and the mist thickens along the far bank and the fireflies come out brighter. A touch clears the air.
• Petals sink after a few bars with a sigh, their note an octave below. The pedal holds eight at most.
• The beat that cannot be ignored. The bass is alone on the downbeat, and now and then a visitor takes it: a shooting star across the sky plays a soft run down the top of the scale, a fish out of the river plays the chord upward, an owl in the willow gives two low hoots. Each waits for its downbeat and plays in the chord and key of that moment. They are rationed like the rest of the river’s voice, so when you are busy they come in silence. The stars lift a little with every bass note.
• The piece is Satie’s first Gymnopédie, played round and round by the willow: the 31 bars with the first ending, then again with the second.
• Satie plays it. Press Satie plays it, or P while it is playing, and the melody is played on the river the way he wrote it: the same touches one person with one cursor would make, on the beat: a note on the river for each melody note, and a touch on the willow halfway through the first beat of every bar to bring the next chord. A pink cursor shows where each touch goes. P again stops him.

There are no controls. Space pauses, and a touch starts it again.

There are things to find.

The piano is the site’s soundfont grand through a felt lid and a generated hall. The river and the air are raw WebAudio: a hush of filtered noise that is always there and rises when you stir the water, a babble of little rising plips, a drone under the bass that crossfades when the root moves, a low breath of wind, a rush that swells as a gust front crosses the screen, leaves rustling when it goes through the willow, and crickets in the grass, more of them when the meadow is left alone.

The picture is a grid of glyphs and a few free-floating ones, drawn with WebGL from a font atlas, so the water flows in text while the feathers fall smoothly across it. There is no sky: the screen is a window into one great isometric tile of land and river, and the sky is only in the water. The moon lies on the river as a broken reflection, stars glint between the ripples, clouds pass over as shadows, and shooting stars streak across the surface. The river winds through, wide, with rocks, foam lines streaming off them, eddies, and sand and pebbles through the shallows. The willow stands upstream on the far bank, its crown lit on the moon’s side, its curtain partly behind the trunk and partly in front, its shadow on the grass and its reflection in the water. Its leaves float the whole way down, turning over as they go, fastest in the eddies.

Changelog

• Initial release