Audio-reactive visualizers for a voice assistant. Each one is a single hand-written file — no build step, no dependencies, nothing to install.
Nothing on screen runs on a timer. Every one of these is wired to what the assistant is actually doing, so the picture is a readout rather than a screensaver. Four states, and they look different from each other in kind, not just in speed:
The colours carry meaning too, and they do not rotate: cyan is inbound, magenta is the assistant’s own internal work, amber is a background job running unasked, green is the answer going out. A busy machine looks busy. When the signal stops, everything settles — a scene still dancing with no input would be lying to you.
Every voice on /hear now has a room behind it. Not a colour swap — a scene, drawn from the accent: a study, a parlour, a kitchen, an attic with string lights.
They are not wallpaper. Each room has one light source, and that light is driven by the live voice — so it brightens and settles with whoever is speaking. Drawn entirely with canvas primitives: no images, no fonts, nothing fetched.
The board as it runs today. Darker and sparser than v.1: near-black substrate, thin lit traces rather than shaded copper, and the light coming from the traces themselves instead of falling on them. The name descrambles into a terminal panel at the centre, an oscilloscope sits inside a chip housing drawing real samples, and four colours of pulse each mean something.
Read the codePalette rebuilt, and it reversed an earlier decision. v.1 had pulled the copper down to a third of its chroma to match the site. 1.2 goes the other way: near-black board, lit green traces.
Shading removed, deliberately. v.1 stacked four stroke passes — mask, drop shadow, body, lit edge — to make the copper read as raised metal. A drop shadow under a light source is a contradiction, and it made every run look heavy. Back to two passes, trace weight cut from 2.4 to 1.15, glow tightened from 7px to 5px.
Pulses carry meaning. Two colours became four: inbound, the assistant's own internal work, background jobs, and outbound speech. The mix follows the state, so thinking looks different from idle rather than just faster.
The scope moved into a component. It was a rectangle floating over the board, which read as a debug overlay. Now it sits inside a chip package with pins, a bevel, a silkscreen designator and a recessed glass window, with a graticule behind the trace and a clip so it cannot spill onto the board.
The centre readout descrambles. Characters churn and resolve like something being decrypted, driven by the live energy — about one character a second at rest, nine flat out. It visibly stalls part-resolved when the signal dies, which is the point: it is instrumentation, not decoration.
A terminal panel and a vignette. The name sits in a black panel with a hairline border and corner ticks, with a warm bloom behind it that rides the glow energy. The frame darkens at the edges so the middle carries the eye.
A status bar. Name top-left, live state and a running clock top-right. It shows the real state — if it ever reads IDLE during speech, the bar is lying and that is a bug.
Honest note: none of this was checked by rendering it. The browser on the build machine holds a profile lock, so it was verified structurally and by eye over the code, then handed over for a human to look at.
A circuit board that lights up when it hears you. Copper routes like real copper — right angles, chamfers, teardropped pads — lit and shadowed so it sits on the substrate instead of being drawn into it. Signals race the traces toward the chip, a readout at the centre descrambles words as it thinks, and pressure waves fire on the peaks of speech rather than on the level, which is what makes it read as talking instead of pulsing. When the voice stops, the board settles.
Read it See it running