Slowbloom
Hold your whole body still and time dilates through Karel’s real piano — the pitch frozen, a single chord blooming into a long now.
Press begin — the piece starts conducting itself with a slow breathing demo. Allow the camera to take the baton and dilate time with your own stillness.
Design notes
The question: what if the stiller you hold your whole body, the slower time flows through your own piano recording — with the pitch frozen — so a single chord blooms and hangs for many seconds? Motion energy from your shoulders, wrists and nose becomes the conductor of time itself. Currently playing: Interplay.
Pitch is preserved by a real-time, variable-rate STFT phase-vocoder time-scale modification running inside an AudioWorklet (2048-point frames, 512 synthesis hop, 75% Hann overlap-add, a self-contained radix-2 FFT/IFFT). The synthesis hop is fixed while the analysis hop shrinks with the stretch factor, so the read head crawls through the take while every partial keeps its exact frequency — playbackRate is never touched. A demo drive (a slow breathing curve) exercises the identical energy → stretch → bloom chain with no webcam, so the whole mechanism is alive headless.
The light field is raw WebGL2: a ping-pong feedback buffer whose retention rises with stillness (a long exposure that accretes light) and whose dispersion rises with motion, a spectral bloom driven by the master analyser, and volumetric light shafts — rendered in a near-achromatic pewter-to-pearl, moonlit palette.
refs — Flanagan & Golden, “Phase Vocoder,” Bell System Technical Journal (1966); Dolson, “The Phase Vocoder: A Tutorial,” Computer Music Journal (1986); Lubis, Peng, Carreño & Tsai, arXiv 2609.18999 (2026).