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Aviary presents

FLAMEBACK

The Mridangam — Carnatic percussion, synthesized from physics in your browser.
No installs · no samples · one HTML file · MEMBRANE inside.

Two heads, one drum. FLAMEBACK speaks eleven strokes over a real tala grid — and every stroke has a spoken syllable, the way a bird has a call. Gumki bends on the bass head, harmonic overtones on the treble, all of it modal synthesis, not a recording. Named for the greater flameback: the Indian woodpecker, ornithology's literal drummer — who also lives in hollowed wood.

localhost — FLAMEBACK · The Mridangam
A live FLAMEBACK session — the tala grid mid-avartanam
Drop a screenshot of a session in here.
Save it next to this file as flameback-kit.png and refresh.
A live session — Adi tala on the grid, gumki riding the bass head.
Why this exists

Problem · Resolution · Reason

Drum machines think in sixteen steps. The mridangam doesn't.

01 · THE PROBLEM

No seat for the mridangam

Every browser drum tool speaks the same 4/4 step grid — talas don't fit. Sample packs of Indian percussion sound like a recording of someone else's hands in someone else's room. And the real instrument is two heads, a tuning wrench, and years of grammar away.

02 · THE RESOLUTION

Synthesize the drum itself

MEMBRANE — modal synthesis, no samples: every stroke is a small bank of sine modes with per-mode decays and one noise transient. The treble head's overtones sit harmonic because the physics says so (the karanai patch, pinned within 2% by the self-test); the gumki is a real pitch bend on the bass head; a closed TA damps a ringing DHIN, exactly like the instrument's own grammar. The grid thinks in talas — anga borders drawn, sam marked.

03 · THE REASON

Three passions, one bird

I took mridangam lessons with my brother when we were young, and what stuck was that every stroke on the drum is also a human vocal sound — you can speak the rhythm before you play it, the way a bird speaks its call. The drum itself is a hollowed-out log — a woodpecker's home — with a piercing, almost synthetic-sounding resonance that cuts through everything, much like the woodpecker itself. FLAMEBACK is three passions in one instrument: Indian culture, synthesizers, and birds. And those rhythms were always headed somewhere — they sit beautifully under drum & bass, breakbeat, and dub. Bounce an avartanam onto a CHIRP deck and hear it.

Under the skin

What the drum can do

MEMBRANE inside — a physics engine, not a sampler: sine-mode banks + one band-passed transient per stroke, on any audio context.
Eleven strokes, two heads — the solkattu vocabulary, including KA (the left hand's closed tap) and the DHI MI ring-finger bounce; closed strokes damp ringing ones on the same head, statefully, like real hands.
Gumki — the bass head's singing pitch bend, built as scheduled frequency ramps on the modal oscillators.
Real talas — Adi (4+2+2), Rupaka, Misra Chapu, Khanda Chapu, or a FREE count; anga boundaries drawn, sam marked, ×3 gati chip for the idiomatic burn.
Sruti tuning — tune the drum so it sits against whatever's on your deck.
Deterministic to the float — one seeded noise buffer, no randomness near audio; the live path IS the bounce path, and the self-test proves it.
Seam-folded WAV bounce — a loop-perfect avartanam that lands straight in CHIRP's Beats tank; these rhythms were built for drum & bass, breakbeat, and dub.
Deliberately dry — like TRILL, the booth adds the space; the drum arrives clean.
One self-contained file — runs from file://, ships with ?selftest=1 built in.
Seven themes — the Aviary worlds, chrome tinted to each accent; EMBER is home.

Membrane physics under solkattu names — the drum is math, and the math is a drum.

Pick a tala. Speak the strokes. Bounce it.

It's one self-contained HTML file. Nothing to install — the drum tunes itself to your deck.

1. Open flameback.html 2. Pick a tala 3. Place the strokes 4. Bounce → CHIRP deck