Tonebeats

Under the tones sits an optional bed of shaped noise: an ocean, a wind, a low steady wash, in six colors (white, pink, brown, blue, violet, and grey). It is not filler. A field of even sound gives wandering attention something plain to rest on and covers the small noises of a room. When the bed is set to breathe, its filter opens and closes in a slow cycle you can pace your own breath to.

The default excursion is binaural, and binaural requires headphones: the two tones must reach the two ears separately. On speakers, open the studio and switch the excursion to isochronic, which works either way.

Two reels sit in the well at the top. As a session runs the left empties and the right fills: the wound tape is the progress bar. Drag across the reels to scrub.

Below the reels, the counter shows the time remaining, counting down.

Rewind and forward step by a minute. Play resumes from your place; Stop holds it. Record writes the current excursion to an audio file you keep, at full quality.

The long scale is the frequency dial. The white needle rides the live beat, gliding down through the bands during a descent; the numeric readout shows the same rate and its band.

How far the descent sinks. Raise it to reach deeper toward delta; the starting rate never moves.

The level of the noise bed, the wash you settle your attention on. Down toward silence, up toward a fuller sea.

The slow sweep of the noise’s filter. Raised past center it synchronizes to the excursion and slows as the beat descends.

A slow orbit of the noise around the head. Off at the low end; wider and slower as you raise it. Headphones.

The session’s total running time, from ten to ninety minutes. It scales the whole excursion to fit.

Listening level. It sits after the safety limiter, so it only ever attenuates and never pushes the output past the ceiling.

The plate at the bottom names the current excursion. Step through with the arrows, or open the full list: the shipped presets and anything you have saved.

The STUDIO key opens the panel to the workshop. Your place is kept.

The large recessed display draws the excursion as a trace across the bands, left to right over time. Every circle on the active trace is a node, a junction between two segments. Drag a node up or down to set its frequency; drag an interior node left or right to move it in time; double-click the field to add a node. An excursion holds up to five segments per tone, over a total up to ninety minutes.

Each tone layer has a base carrier, a level, and a waveform (sine, triangle, or square). Stack up to three. Set the tone type here: binaural (headphones), isochronic (speakers or headphones), monaural, or bilateral (alternating left and right, for the EMDR-style audience).

The noise bed: its color and level, an optional resonant filter (lowpass, bandpass, or highpass) with a slow sweep that can breathe with the excursion, and an optional orbit around the head. Up to three noise layers.

Ordinarily the beat travels and the base carrier holds. Tick tone curve and the carrier travels too: each segment takes a start and an end pitch, shaped by the same curve as the beat. The Solfeggio Ascent and Descent stations are built on it, stepping through all nine tones (174, 285, 396, 417, 528, 639, 741, 852 and 963 Hz) in equal stages. Perceived loudness is re-trimmed as the pitch moves, so a climb through the series does not also become a crescendo.

SHARE copies a link with the entire excursion encoded inside it, every segment, tone, noise layer and clip. No account and no server storage. Anyone who opens it lands in the studio with a working copy.

Save keeps the excursion as a station on both faces. Export renders it to a real audio file, WAV (lossless) or MP3 (320 kbps), computed at full quality in your browser, independent of the preview. Everything is synthesized: the noise never repeats, and the file is yours to keep and play anywhere.

Sets a noise bed breathing to a cadence you can follow. Three are fitted: 4-7-8 (four in, seven held, eight out), box (four each way with a hold at both ends), and coherent (five and a half seconds each way, the rate at which heart and breath fall into step). Phases are stored as proportions rather than absolute seconds, so a cadence keeps its shape at any pace. Rates are held between four and twenty breaths a minute.

Fixed runs the cadence as written. Follow hands the rate to the excursion, so the breath slows exactly where the beat slows, holds included. Ramp does the same against the clock. Follow maps between two breathable rates rather than scaling by the beat directly, which would ask for one breath every twenty-five seconds at the bottom of a deep descent.

Level alone is a weak cue on broadband noise, so a cadence with a seven-count hold can still be heard as a plain wobble. Brightness is what carries the shape: the inhale opens the bed’s filter and the exhale closes it, centred on the cutoff set in the noise panel so the bed is never left brighter than it was tuned. Above zero it takes the cutoff over from the bed’s own sweep.

A progression over the drone. The drone holds and remains the tonic, so the beats keep their anchor and the chords move with the base pitch. Each clip is a scale degree and a quality (major, minor, diminished, sus2, sus4, major seventh, minor seventh, add nine) held for a length you set; the strip loops. Eight scales are fitted: major, minor, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian, and the two pentatonics. Every chord is tuned justly from its own root rather than by stacking scale degrees.

The chord’s notes sound one at a time. Nothing is started or stopped to do it: the voices run continuously and the arpeggio gates which is audible, so it cannot click however it is driven. Patterns are up, down, up-and-down, and random. Each note has an attack, decay, sustain and release; set long, the notes overlap into a wash.

The step lane has its own length, deliberately independent of the note count, so three notes on a seven-step lane repeat every twenty-eight steps rather than every four. Any step can rest, and the note order runs past a rest rather than pausing, so silencing one changes which note lands where for the rest of the loop. Rate comes from one of three sources: free in notes per second, tempo as a note value against a bpm, or the beat itself divided, which makes the arpeggio slow as the excursion descends.

A Chladni nodal figure solved for every rate now sounding, each in proportion to its level. The figure grows finer as the beat climbs.

The same plate strewn with grain. The tones sort it, since a standing wave throws each grain in proportion to the displacement beneath it, so grains settle on the nodes. The bed stirs everything evenly instead, because broadband noise has no nodes: a loud swell visibly dissolves a figure that a settling bed then lets re-form.

The real samples, one trace per ear, triggered so the left stands still. The right slides against it, completing one pass per beat. With binaural that drift is the beat, since nothing in the air is beating.

Dust falling toward you through the port. This is the one for looking rather than reading, and the only view that draws on the score as well as the signal: an arpeggio note throws a ring you pass through, a chord change turns the field over into a new accent, and a breath pacer opens and closes the aperture while the dust gathers on the inhale. The other three are measurements and are worth trusting because of it; this one is kept apart so the difference stays a choice. It still responds to sound with no chords and no arpeggio at all.