xyinst

An instrument that sounds only while you hold it. Sideways moves the pitch, up and down moves a value that differs from sound to sound. Eighty-eight of them in eleven banks — sirens, sweeps, modulation, noise, tape, dub. Draw a rectangle and a dot runs its edges, sounding each corner as it passes.

https://xyinst.netlify.app

Controls

To begin: It sounds only while you hold the panel. Let go and it stops. A finger and a mouse behave the same.
Across and up the panel: Sideways is pitch; the note names at the lower corners mark the range. Up and down is a value that differs from sound to sound, named along the left edge — BRIGHT, SPEED, CUTOFF and so on. While you hold, the current value shows on a small label.
Choosing a sound: The arrows at the top step through them. Press the name to open the list: eighty-eight sounds across eleven banks — SIREN, SWEEP, MOD, GLITCH, NOISE, ANALOG, DIGITAL, LO-FI, TAPE, MINIMAL, DUB.
DUB: The dub siren bank. For these eight, up and down is the speed of the wobble — the same assignment as the real boxes. Hold Wash and Throw with them. SYNC SIREN is the exception: its wobble locks to the tempo, and up and down picks the division, from a whole bar down to a sixteenth.
Snap: Pulls the pitch onto the notes of the scale. Switch it off and the pitch slides freely.
Shapes: A second way to play. Press SHAPES at the top, then drag on the panel to draw a rectangle: a dot runs its edges and the current sound plays at every corner. A corner’s horizontal position is its pitch, its vertical position the value that belongs to that sound. The larger the rectangle, the slower the lap — snapped to between half a bar and four bars. Every rectangle sits on the same grid of beats, so rectangles of different sizes drift against one another in whole-number ratios. Tap inside one to remove it; CLEAR removes them all.
Throw / Wash / Gate: They act only while held down. Throw lets the delay burst out, Wash sends the sound into the reverb, Gate chops it in sixteenths.
Tap / Kill: Tap sets the tempo from the intervals at which you tap. Kill stops everything that is sounding.
Delay / Time / Feedback / Volume: The amount of delay, its interval (Sync locks it to the beat), how much comes back, and the level.
Settings: Opens from the mark at the top right. Key and scale (twelve of them — minor, major, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, pentatonics, blues, in, Ryukyu, whole tone, chromatic), the base octave, how many octaves fit across the panel, how smoothly the pitch moves, the length of the tail, and the tempo.
Keyboard: Arrow keys step through the sounds, S toggles Snap, D toggles Shapes, holding Q, W or E gives Throw, Wash or Gate, T taps the tempo, Esc stops everything.

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