Sound design prompt cards
EARSEARS is a deck for challenging your sound design. Four suits deal you a constraint each: ear (who hears it, and on what terms), act (how you make it, here, now), routine (where and when it happens), and shade (what colours it — the strange one). You invent the thing that makes the sound, then make it out loud and record it.
The awkward draws are the useful ones. A hand that cannot be satisfied with a synth patch forces the question of what the artefact actually is — which is the part most sound briefs skip. 96 cards, drawn without replacement, structure after Candy & Watson's The Thing From The Future.
What came out of the deck so far
A lullaby for one side of the bed
A lullaby with no audio at all. It plays through a phone's haptic motor for one sleeper, so the other side of the bed hears nothing; everywhere else it is a score you can read and copy.
ear felt rather than heard
act feel as a vibration pattern
routine bedtime
shade plush
A goodbye that is only said once
A departure tone that is synthesised at the moment of leaving, played once, and never stored. Nobody, including the system, gets to hear it twice.
ear heard then forgotten
act sound with synthesis
routine a departure
shade brittle
Street Sherbet No. 4
A celebration chime for a whole street, issued as a powder. Nothing is broadcast: every household is handed a sachet and takes it on the same minute, so the crackle happens inside forty mouths at once and the street itself stays quiet.
ear the whole street hears it
act taste, as a tasting note
routine a celebration
shade fizzy
Notice of Refusal
What a device receives when its application to make a sound is refused. Schedule B, enclosed, is the score it must perform instead. A carbon-copy form as a piece of sound design.
ear requested and denied
act notate for someone else
routine awaiting a decision
shade chalky
Each artefact names the four cards that produced it, so the draw can be checked against the outcome. Made something with the deck? Send it over.
Generative art projects
GenerativePieces that compose themselves inside rules I set, then let you interfere. Both projects here ask the same underlying question from opposite ends: what happens when a lot of small sonic decisions are allowed to run at once, and how much coherence can a system stand to lose before it stops sounding like one thing?
House Choir
Ten household things, each with a voice and a schedule, all talking over each other. Switch appliances on and off, re-roll the wild voices, or hold one device out of the family to hear exactly what a misfit costs. The premise: what would a home sound like if the appliances were tuned as an ensemble — and what if some of them had no manners?
Run the flat →House Choir — illustrated
The same engine, with every appliance drawn as a character with a face. Built for work on how sound shapes perceived anthropomorphism and animacy: the visual treatment is the only variable that changes, so the two versions can be compared directly.
Meet the appliances →Seeded Plucks
One seed produces one piece: the same marks, the same notes, in the same order, every time. The seed lives in the URL, so a piece is a link you can send. Every mark on the paper is an event you heard — nothing is drawn silently, including the structural rules. Click while it runs and your event is written into the seed, so a take replays exactly as you played it.
v4.0 current · exports PNG, plotter-ready SVG and WAV
Earlier: v1 · v2 · v3
Sound-based games
GamesGames where listening is the mechanic rather than the soundtrack. If a player cannot succeed without hearing the difference, then the sound design has to carry real information — which makes these useful testbeds for questions about discrimination, learning, and how quickly an ear adapts.
Sonic Colony
A colony is one family of voices. Outsiders drift in: some are of the family and merely out of place, and can be tuned until they belong. Others are a different kind of thing altogether, however closely they match in pitch or brightness, and never will. Your job is to decide who belongs and who doesn't — by ear. Absorb one and its voice joins the breeding pool, so the colony drifts under you.
Prototype · headphones recommended · session label optional
Start a colony →Sonic Colony scores how well you told your own from outsiders, not where you set the sliders — taste is deliberately not measured.
🎧 Take part in a study
Several of these prototypes are recruiting listeners, and the EARS deck is still in testing. No audio expertise required — ordinary ears are the point.
Related work
Use & reuse
These prototypes are made available for teaching, workshops, and research. If you would like to run one with a group, adapt it, or cite it, get in touch — I am also glad to hear where it broke.