Made by Paul Ford at Aboard · open source · MIT
A generative instrument you play by moving through a 274-genre space. Every song is rendered live in your browser and is fully deterministic from a seed — the same seed always plays the same music. Every genre is verified by a genre-confusion matrix: all 274 must sound most like themselves after every change.
How a song is made →Drag anywhere to set a destination — the song journeys there, never jumps. Double-click to drop path waypoints: a constellation line connects them and a traveler walks the path, morphing the music through every genre it crosses — the path is the mix. Drag the pink playhead to scrub; drag waypoints to reshape; right-click a waypoint erases it. Scroll or pinch zooms the chart. Stop twice rewinds to the top. ▶ plays · ✦ cycles the three views (star map, inside-the-sound, aliens) · ⚙ opens the controls — volume, vapor, soundfont, seed, speed, ±bpm, an embed snippet and ⤓ midi (the song you're hearing as a Standard MIDI File). The demoscene backdrop runs by itself and swaps carts on the beat. The address bar carries your seed, path and measure — a bookmark or a shared link reopens exactly this music, right here.
Accessible text version → screen-reader- and keyboard-first, no visuals required