14848 · Holdlight
Hold the light
Five of Karel's real piano takes, each a thin thread of light. There is no play button. A take sounds only while you press and hold its thread — let go and both the sound and the light fade. You can hold at most two at once, and a thread left untended slowly dims into neglect, until it is gone.
Press and hold a thread to keep it present. On a keyboard, hold keys 1 2 3 4 5.
Read the design notes
This is an anti-mixer. A fader bank lets you set a level and walk away; here presence is scarce and enacted. Holding a thread routes its looping audio — one of Karel's verified recordings — through a per-voice gain envelope that is the brightness you see, driven entirely by whether you are pressing. Release and the envelope decays over about a second and a half; you cannot set-and-forget.
Attention is finite: at most two threads may sound at once, and a third press is refused with a brief pulse rather than granted. And attention has memory. Every unheld thread accrues neglect, which dims and thins it and scales its revive-rate by (1 − 0.72·neglect), so a long-neglected thread blooms back slowly. A thread left fully neglected long enough goes permanently dark for the session — true loss, revivable only by letting everything rest.
Each thread quivers to its own live AnalyserNode tap, not a shared mix, so the light is that take's own energy. Every audible sound routes through a single createSafeMaster; there is zero synthesis. The palette is committed grayscale — white through graphite, luminance only.
Lineage: Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening — attention as an active, effortful discipline rather than a passive reception; and the 2026 framing of the listener as composer-performer whose attention is the primary creative tool (ACM Creativity & Cognition 2026).
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