Hann window
換羽 kan'u.
— THE MOLT · FEATHER-REPLACEMENT · 6–8 WEEKS —
PROJECT LAVOS · AUDIOWORKLET · GRANULAR · 15 PITCHES · ~90 SECOND CYCLE
Specimen 046 · The Score assigned each plate a pitch.
Specimen 047 · The Étude arranged them into a piece.
Plate XVI · The Swan argued
the molt is the song. This is the molt.
An AudioWorklet generates a granular cloud — each grain is a single sine wave with a Hann-window envelope, fifty milliseconds long, drawn at random from the fifteen plate pitches.
The cloud breathes through a ninety-second cycle: dense, fading, silent, emerging, dense.
Every grain is a feather. Every silence is a flight.
Hann window
40–80 ms range
D3 — D5 · 15 voices
five breaths
The Whooper Swan in Manyōshū poetry is the bird of longing — its arrival is a winter event, its departure a spring grief. The Mute Swan in European myth sings only at death. The Black Swan upended a two-thousand-year-old assumption about what swans could be. None of these moments are continuous. Each is the moment after which the bird is gone, or the bird is something else, or the bird arrives and stays for a season and is gone again.
Granular synthesis, formalized by Curtis Roads in the 1970s and shipped as a browser primitive in the AudioWorklet thirty years later, is the audio technique whose unit of sound is impermanence. Each grain is brief; each grain is gone. The cloud is the body of work; the grains are the artifacts; the silence is the molt. What you hear is not a tone but a season.
The pulse. The score. The étude. The molt. The chord, the swan, the silence between. The studies, breathing.