one continuous generative galaxy you can fly in either direction
drag to steer the camera · click to aim · scroll to fly, again to fall back
arrow keys travel · space suspends · R reshuffles · M sound
You are looking at a machine that composes itself. The bodies, the light, and the music are generated live in your browser from a single self-contained HTML file. There is no recording, no library, and no network.
You are inside one continuous galaxy. Press on the sky and drag to steer: left and right sweep the horizon, and up and down raise or lower your gaze. A short press aims at a body or into empty space, then scroll to fly forward along that ray. Scroll the other way to fall backward along the same line and retrace your path. Bodies swell with perspective as you approach, pass beside or behind the camera, and keep their places in the sky behind you.
The galaxy is carved into cubic regions that are generated lazily from your universe's seed and each region's coordinates. Fly a thousand regions away and return: the same bodies, rings, and colors wait exactly where you left them. Only a small neighborhood lives in memory at any moment. Everything else is recomputed, identically, on demand.
Every body carries a slow motion of its own (an orbit, a drift, or a wobble) drawn from the same seed that placed it, so each returns to its post when you come back. Close bodies move gently so flybys stay readable; distant ones wander more freely.
Motion is part of the score. The sound tracks your actual velocity: small scrolls are already audible, larger bursts open the filters, widen the stereo field, feed the delay and reverb, and raise a low breath beneath the drones; slowing lets the ambience settle again, and flying backward darkens the tone and stretches the echoes. Dragging composes too: turning sweeps the sound across the room and fast swings add brightness and shimmer that settle when you let go. Dragging is also a scan. As the aim beam sweeps past bodies, each one rings out as its own short voice: pitch from the body's place in the scale, register from its kind, brightness from its depth, pan from where it crossed your view. Sweep slowly to hear bodies one by one, or sweep fast to hear a burst of them.
The galaxy composes even while you rest. The slow drift of all those bodies is measured as one moving field (how far the crowd leans, how it churns, how it breathes), and that field steers the chord color, the filter sway, the stereo orbit, and the echo character. Leave it alone for a few seconds and listen: the piece keeps changing without you. Close passes still become musical events shaped by a body's bearing, size, and your velocity, and selecting a body gently pulls the harmony toward it. Each region has its own transposition, timbre brightness, and spatial width, and flying back recovers them.
The piece began as a challenge to make one HTML file feel like music for the eyes. I directed the interaction and sound design through repeated live testing. Clarence, my AI system, ran the build and verification, using Ox Alpha as an implementation model.