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Extended Play writes a long piece of drone music while you listen to it. Nothing here is a recording. Twenty-four layers run at once, some of them holding a note for as long as the page is open, others waking up every so often to play something and then going quiet again.
This is the biggest switch on the page. It picks which instruments exist and how long they wait between playing anything.
Drift is the original. Rain, vinyl crackle, a strummed guitar, a music box. Something happens every few seconds and the key moves about once a minute.
Slow Bow is a bowed ensemble with a low horn. Rain and vinyl are gone, and so is the music box. Every gap is roughly ten times longer and the reverb tail runs twice as long. Notes take twenty or thirty seconds to arrive rather than starting. The key holds for five to eight minutes and then slides to the next one over most of a minute, so you hear the change happen instead of catching it after the fact. Give it a few minutes before deciding. It is deliberately slow to get going.
Changing palette rebuilds the whole audio engine, so there is a short fade to silence and then a slow fade back in. Your sliders and your muted layers carry over, and so does your seed.
One dot per layer, in three groups.
Foundation is the drone itself, the sustained strings, the shimmer and the breath. These never stop. Texture is the background noise, the wind, the tape loop, the bowed metal. Voices are the layers that fire and then go quiet, like the piano and the cello.
A dot brightens while its layer is making sound. Hover or tap and the name appears underneath. Tap it again to mute that layer, which turns it red, and tap once more to bring it back. Dots for layers the current palette does not build are dimmed and do nothing.
Evolution is how busy the piece is. It stretches or squeezes the gap between events and speeds up the slow modulations underneath everything. Push it up if the page feels empty.
Richness sets how much of the harmonic stack you hear. Low is the fundamental and not much else. High brings in the upper harmonics, the high strings, the shimmer and the bowed metal.
Brightness is a filter across the whole output. At the Fog end the top is rolled off and everything sounds further away. At the Glass end you get the detail back.
Space is the balance between the dry sound and the reverb. All the way up it is mostly room and very little instrument.
Age controls the tape loop, which is a real loop that catches whatever some of the other layers play and hands it back to you a few seconds later. Turn Age up and the loop gets darker and more worn every time round.
Foundation sets the level of the eight bottom layers against everything else. Thin pulls the drone back under the instruments. Dense puts it in front.
Four starting points. Each one moves all six sliders and mutes a handful of layers. Fog is dark and slow, Cathedral is wet and bright. Tape leans on the loop. Bare strips the whole thing down to the drone and a couple of voices. Touch any slider or dot afterwards and the preset stops being highlighted, because at that point it is no longer what you are listening to.
The piece does not run flat. It moves through five named sections, and the current one shows under the dots. Each section decides which voices sit out and how far apart the rest of them sit, and it moves the sustained layers up or down in the mix. The first section plays once at the start and never comes back. After the last one it loops round to the second.
On Drift a full cycle is about half an hour. On Slow Bow it is closer to an hour.
Pick thirty, sixty or ninety minutes and the piece fades out over the last ninety seconds and then stops. Off cancels it and brings the volume back.
The seed is a number the engine uses for every random decision it makes. Same seed, same decisions, which means the same piece. It shows as a short run of hex characters under the share buttons.
Copy link puts everything into the address: your six sliders, which layers you muted, your palette and your seed. Send it to someone and they hear what you heard. New seed keeps your settings and rolls a different piece, and it takes effect gradually, as each layer makes its next decision.
What a seed will not give you is an identical recording. Timers drift by a few milliseconds and the audio clock starts wherever it starts, so the same seed gives you the same decisions at slightly different moments.
Space bar plays and pauses. The page works offline once you have loaded it
twice. Add ?debug to the address and the console will tell you
what every layer is doing.