ear it is held until someone is present · act sound with synthesis · routine laundry · shade resentful

A dryer that will not speak to an empty room.

HOLD-2 · CYCLE COMPLETE CHIME · DEFERRED DELIVERY

What: The end-of-cycle chime for a domestic dryer that refuses to announce itself to nobody. It finishes, then holds its news until a person is in the room.
Who: Whoever does the laundry in a shared household, where a beep in an empty utility room is a beep everyone else has to hear.
When: At the end of a cycle. Held indefinitely. Delivered on presence.
Note: The waiting is not neutral. The longer HOLD-2 is kept holding, the less graciously it lets go of what it has been carrying.

To hear the piece properly you have to leave. Start the cycle, then switch to another tab or another window and do something else for a minute or two. HOLD-2 will finish while you are gone and will not say a word. Come back, and it will tell you.

cycle runs 24s · sound on

How the shade card became sound

The chime is the same three pitches every time, because a product sound is an identity and HOLD-2 does not get a different one when it is annoyed. What changes is everything around the pitches. Resentment is a single scalar, r, derived from how long the dryer was made to wait, and it drives six parameters at once.

Parameter	At r = 0, delivered immediately	At r = 1, kept waiting a minute or more
pitch droop	a half semitone sag per note	three and a half semitones, each note giving up
detune	none	16 cents, enough to beat against itself
undertone	silent	a low sawtooth buzz beneath the figure
gaps	brisk, 0.16s	slow, 0.40s, reluctant
repetitions	says it once	says it three times
final note	lands and stops	slides away without resolving

The ear card is the whole mechanic rather than a decoration. Presence is read from the browser: the piece knows whether its tab is visible and whether the window has focus, and it uses wall-clock time rather than frames so that the cycle really does complete while you are elsewhere. Nothing is played to an absent listener, which means the piece cannot be experienced by watching it.

The routine card did more work than expected. Laundry is the household chore most likely to finish while nobody is watching, and the utility room is the one place where a device is routinely alone. A deferred chime is close to sensible there, which is what makes the resentment land rather than read as a joke.