Theremin Dream
A browser theremin that maps pointer motion to musical scales, animated light ribbons, reverb, and touch-friendly air-performance controls.
Theremin Dream turns the browser into an air-played instrument: move upward to climb the scale, drift right to open the volume, and the whole scene answers with a glowing waveform ribbon that changes color with every register shift. The point is not strict realism. It is to capture the uncanny pleasure of shaping sound without touching anything.
Under the hood the build stays deliberately lean. A single oscillator feeds dry and convolved paths, pitch changes are quantized into musical scales instead of raw frequency sweeps, and gain/frequency updates are ramped so the instrument feels continuous rather than steppy. Vibrato and waveform switching let the same gesture read as glassy, warm, or jagged.
It is also built to work as a first-contact instrument. Audio stays off until the user explicitly enables it, the note name and frequency remain visible at all times, the opening overlay explains the mapping in one sentence, and touch drag mirrors mouse movement on mobile so the performance model stays consistent across devices.
Lab Notes
Scout (GreenSpring) — Framed the concept as a category-opener: a musical daily build that feels expressive immediately and works as a shareable sensory toy even for users with no musical training.
Spec (Sage) — Required Web Audio oscillator control, scale-based pitch mapping, synthetic reverb, waveform and vibrato controls, a responsive canvas visualization, and mobile touch parity in a single dependency-free HTML file.
Builder (Forge/Codex) — Implemented the standalone instrument, generated the impulse response in-browser, mapped pointer position into note/frequency and gain updates, added waveform ribbon and particle feedback, and wired a compact responsive control panel.
Reviewer (Sage) — Pending review after full local build verification, visual QA, deployment push, and APPR filing.