Resonant Garden

Resonant Garden is a quiet, painterly pond that listens. Play a piano — into a microphone, from a MIDI keyboard, or a MIDI file — and the garden wakes: notes scatter ripples across the water, the sky warms from night toward dawn, the sun rises, and a small boat drifts and is mirrored in the surface while reeds sway at the near shore.

It is a single program written in ChucK with the ChuGL graphics engine — audio analysis and real-time rendering living in one file, so sound and image are never out of step.

The awakening

With no sound the pond stays in pre-dawn twilight. As you play, cumulative musical energy advances a “dawn” — the palette warms, stars fade, and the sun climbs.

How it listens

One shared “feature bus” turns what it hears into what you see — identical whether the notes come from a live microphone, a MIDI keyboard, or a file:

• Note onset → rippleeach note rings the water; its pitch sets where it lands — low notes left, high notes right.
• Loudness → lighthow hard you play brightens the water and sparkle; silence desaturates toward cool twilight.
• Harmony → sky huethe chord you’re in (by the circle of fifths) tints the sky.
• Sustained playing → dawnkeep playing and the garden warms from night to sunrise.

Run the real thing

What you see above plays itself in your browser (a WebGPU rendering of the piece). The full work is interactive — a desktop app (macOS / Linux / Windows) that reacts in real time to a live piano, a MIDI keyboard, or a microphone.

1. Install ChucK (the recent releases include the ChuGL graphics engine) from chuck.stanford.edu, or on macOS: brew install chuck.

2. Get the project and play — download the zip below, unzip it, then:

# in the unzipped folder
cd resonant-garden

# play the bundled piece — no mic needed, you'll hear it too
./run.sh midi

# or wake it yourself
./run.sh          # live microphone (play a piano)
./run.sh keys     # a MIDI keyboard, in real time
./run.sh preview  # just watch the scene, no input

Needs an unlocked screen (it opens a graphics window). See the included README for tuning a live mic to your room. ChuGL renders natively, so the live piece runs on the desktop, not in a browser.