bon — breath of nature

A generative ambient piece for browser. Not a song; a system that sings.

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01

About

作品

自然の音を倣う音楽、
音楽を装う自然の音。

Inside a cube, eight particles drift through an unseen field. When they collide, they split or die — and a sound is made. The piece never repeats; the same instant never returns.

02

Concept

概念

— Brahman. The unchanging ground beneath the rising and falling of all things. Birth and death are not opposites here; they are the same circulation, listened to.

Every gesture in the work — a particle's birth, a meeting, a quiet death by isolation, a sudden mass extinction — passes through the same horizon. The cube is the instrument; the field is the breath.

03

Life

いのち

Each particle samples a vector from a 3D Perlin field every tick, moving one cell in one of six directions — up, down, left, right, forward, back — weighted by that vector. Not random: the noise carries long-term correlation, so clusters form, dissolve, and gather again somewhere else. The cube holds convergence points and divergence points, like a kind of weather.

Split
Two particles share a cell with low surrounding density: all survive, and a new particle is born.
Death by overcrowding
Too many particles share a cell: all of them die together.
Isolation death
A particle with no neighbors fades, with low probability.
Spontaneous division
When the population is very small, an isolated particle may divide. Life can return from one.
Grace period
Newborns are immune to isolation death for ten ticks.
Mass extinction
Above eighty particles, a sudden cull triggers: each has an 80% chance of death. Two or three quiet minutes follow before life resumes in force.

These rules balance one another. Without a hard cap, the population drifts between thirty and seventy — a dynamic equilibrium close to Wolfram's Class IV: neither periodic nor chaotic, but complex behavior emerging on its own.

04

System

仕組み
voices
Particles that meet certain conditions become voices — bass, four pad, lead — and sing for the rest of their lives. Pitch follows their Y; pan follows their Z.
modes
The scale rotates roughly every minute, drawn from a slow noise:
· 民謡· 平調子· 都節· 琉球· · 全音音階
climate
Three slow noises — flow, depth, brightness — drift over minutes, breathing tempo, reverb, and filter together.
stack
Three.js · Tone.js · single HTML file, ~100 KB. No build step, no data saved. Each session is unrepeatable.
05

Notes from making

手記

Built through pair-programming dialogue with Claude (Anthropic). Decisions, listening, tuning — by kosame. The implementation took shape across hundreds of small exchanges: let it survive from one, the bass and lead keep landing on the same note, change the death sound to a sine, an octave above, let me drag the cube.

The first name was 生滅 — arising-perishing. At some point it began to feel like the sound of nature itself. The work resolved into a single character: . 生滅 was the name of the phenomenon. is the name of the ground that lets it occur.

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