Dusk & Nights

Dusk & Nights is an interactive soundscape where you furnish a cozy room to build music. Each object you drag in activates a stem from an original ambient composition, placed spatially so that position in the room determines volume and panning. The room itself is an instrument: its lamp, fireplace, window, fan and furniture are all real-time audio controls. Two scenes, Dusk and Night, each carry their own music and atmosphere, and can be crossfaded between at any moment. 

The room exists at the threshold between dusk and night, and the visitor's role is to decorate and fill up the night.

Into the night we go...

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Nine musical objects sit in a tray at the bottom of the screen: a piano, candle, music box, guitar, flowers, sofa, radio, drum kit, and violin. Dragging any of them into the room places it on the floor and activates its corresponding audio stem, adding a layer to the music currently playing. Where an object is placed matters: objects near the back of the room sound quieter and more distant; those at the front are louder. Objects placed to the left pan left; to the right, right. The room's spatial layout is the mix.

The installation carries two original compositions. Dusk is a slow ambient piano piece at 80 BPM, structured in 16-bar loops. Night is a more energetic synth-driven piece at 110 BPM in 8-bar loops. Switching between them triggers a five-second crossfade while the room's window transitions from a dusk gradient to a pixel-art starfield and moon.

Beyond object placement, the room's own features are audio controls. The lamp on the left wall can be dragged to add warmth and harmonic saturation, with a faint 60Hz hum at higher settings. The blinds cord, dragged downward, lowers master volume and rolls off high frequencies as the slats close. Clicking the window summons rain and applies a low-pass filter that muffles the music as though heard from inside on a wet evening. The fireplace, when clicked, ignites and adds a feedback delay reverb that gives the space depth and decay. The record player on the side table cycles through playback speeds, bending pitch with a tape-warble effect that ramps gradually between rates. The standing fan cycles through chorus intensities, adding shimmer and width. The aquarium applies a slowly wobbling bandpass filter that gives the music an underwater quality. The metronome on the bookshelf activates tremolo at increasing rates. Clicking either curtain tieback widens the stereo image. Clicking the rug shapes the low end, cycling from a bass cut through flat to a significant bass boost.

A collapsible Atmosphere panel on the left side of the screen provides nine synthesised environmental layers, each generated entirely in the browser with no external audio files: rain, storm with thunder, ocean waves, city night, forest with birdsong, radio static, fireplace crackle, blizzard, and a coffee shop hum. Each atmosphere has its own volume slider and stereo pan control, and multiple layers can run simultaneously and be blended freely.

A collapsible Info panel on the right shows a live readout of every active effect in the signal chain, including the current state of each room control, all placed stems with their volume and pan values, any active atmosphere layers, and a summary of the full signal path from stems to output.

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Built for my university's Audio Experience Design module.