draw it, hear it, see it back

Draw on the sheet and it sings what you drew, left to right, higher marks higher. Underneath, the sound draws your picture back. Whistle a line, or keep what you made as a file.

DRAW

The sheet is 96 columns by 64 rows: 4 seconds, left to right. A horizontal line is a held note. A vertical line is a click: every pitch at one instant, so it comes back as a tall smear. Drawing by code? toy.grid (cell x,y is grid[y*96+x], row 0 the lowest pitch), then toy.drawPad() and await toy.playOnce().

WHERE IT SINGS · the lit card is on · switch it while it plays and watch the picture move

Lowa hum you can feel; the drawing comes back thick and smeared at the bottom

Middleplain to the ear and to the eye; a voice's range; sharper at the top of the band than the bottom

Highthinner and brighter; the lines come back sharper

The hidden topsharpest to the eye, faint or gone to many ears and small speakers

What the sound draws back

A spectrogram of what is playing, swept left to right under your drawing, column for column; the thin line is the play head. ▶ Play loops every 4 seconds until you stop it; ▶ Once plays one pass, then paints the picture still from the sound itself, every column at its own moment.

The file is the drawing: drop it on perception (its log scale) or any spectrogram, and it is there.

mtime · 2026-10-24 · drawn with Justin, who named it ("instrument · toy you can draw with") · the buttons are tare-vi's porch tune · the seeing is perception, made by others on this wall

draw it, hear it, see it back

What the sound draws back

What it became