AVIARY
Theme
Aviary presents

MOLT

The Darkroom — ambient worlds that paint themselves to your music.
No installs · no account · one HTML file · open a plate and breathe.

Twenty-one living paintings — forests, deserts, oceans, and orbits — that listen to whatever you're playing and move to it. Every animal owns a frequency band, every plate hides secrets only the knobs reveal, and none of it ever looks the same twice. Watch it like a fireplace, or grab a knob and fry it.

localhost — MOLT · Darkroom
A live MOLT plate — the kelp forest surging to a beat
Drop a screenshot of your favorite plate in here.
Save it next to this file as molt-plate.png and refresh.
A live develop — the kelp forest surging on the low end, fireflies learning the beat.
Why this exists

Problem · Resolution · Reason

Built for the nights when relaxing was somehow the hardest thing on the list.

01 · THE PROBLEM

Too fried to relax

Some nights you're so cooked you can't even rest right. TV asks for too much attention. Picking a playlist is its own little job, and focusing on the music makes it worse — the hunt for "relaxation content" is what keeps you up. And the internet's supply of meditative visuals runs out faster than the stress does.

02 · THE RESOLUTION

Generate your own worlds

So I made my own: 21 ambient worlds that never look the same, because what they do depends on your track. Put on anything — the fireflies learn its beat, the kelp sways to its bass, the herd moves one animal per band. How it feels depends on what you're listening to and how mischievous you're feeling: watch it breathe, or turn a knob and completely alter the painting.

03 · THE REASON

A long time coming

Years of messing with VJ rigs and photo deep-friers, a lifetime of ambient playlists, and a business-school class on Technopoetics that made generative animation feel inevitable. The same tools that were pure excitement as a kid turned out to be meditation as an adult — so I built the one I wanted to fall asleep to.

Inside the darkroom

What the plates can do

21 living plates — 17 Earth biomes and 4 cosmos vistas, generatively repainted on every visit; no two loads match.
Every band casts a resident — the giraffe leans on the bass, the antelope startle on the highs, cicadas own the ultrasonics, the horse gallops at the track's pace.
Resonance modes — fireflies that learn your beat and sync up (real Kuramoto math), songs that fossilize into rock strata and tree rings, melodies that chart constellations on the circle of fifths, space dust that settles into the Chladni pattern of the loudest note.
The develop rack — 15 knobs, each a real pixel operation: Deep-Fry, Halation, Chroma, Dither, Mirage, Notation (the image re-set in type), and Prism — a true 2D FFT.
Hidden residents — camouflaged animals painted a few shades off their backdrop; the knobs break the camouflage. Some secrets only appear when the track peaks.
FLUSH — startle the local fauna: the childhood M-bird over land, a darting fish underwater, a comet through vacuum. It decays like a reverb tail.
The color wash — a full-frame EQ tint with a soft-knee limiter, so the music colors the image without ever blowing it out.
Capture everything — PNG stills, WebM recordings of a whole session, looping GIFs. The fossilized song exports with the frame.
FEEDER — the whole beat library one click away, playing under the develop. Or drop in any image and fry that instead.
Share a develop — scene, theme, every knob, and the resonance mode pack into a URL. Seven themes, each its own world.

Not a visualizer — a landscape that listens. The sound's structure and the world's structure already rhyme; MOLT just wires them together.

Open a plate. Feed it a beat. Breathe.

It's one self-contained HTML file. Nothing to install, nothing to choose, nothing to scroll — the painting does the work.

1. Open molt.html 2. Pick a world 3. Press play in FEEDER 4. Turn nothing — or everything