AVIARY
Theme
Aviary presents

TRILL

The Arpeggiator — hold a chord and it sings.
No installs · no wrong notes · one HTML file · SYRINX inside.

A trill is rapid alternation between notes in birdsong — which is literally what an arpeggiator does. Tap one pad and TRILL runs the chord as a pattern: on rails, locked to the clock, every note guaranteed in-scale by construction. The theory does the flying; the knobs do the bending.

localhost — TRILL · The Arpeggiator
A live TRILL pattern perched on the wire
Drop a screenshot of a pattern in here.
Save it next to this file as trill-arp.png and refresh.
A live pattern on the wire — sixteenths in A minor, the trance gate chopping.
Why this exists

Problem · Resolution · Reason

Piano lessons grade your hands. The music in your head never took the exam.

01 · THE PROBLEM

The hands gatekeep the theory

A kid can be a "poor piano student" and still walk away with everything that matters — reading music, hearing intervals, knowing why a minor seventh aches. But every path back into playing runs through years of finger technique. Meanwhile the music that actually pulls you in — synthesizers, trance — is built almost entirely of arpeggios running on rails. The knowledge stays; the instrument stays locked.

02 · THE RESOLUTION

Easy mode is a real mode

Let the machine hold the hands, and the theory drives. TRILL's scale and chord tables make a wrong note unrepresentable — pads are scale degrees, chords are stacked thirds, the self-test proves it exhaustively. Pick dorian over minor and hear the difference; stack a 7th and feel what it adds. Then crank it: the TONE macro, the PACE gate (the trance chop is a preset), triplet and 1/32 rates, three octaves — until easy mode is making sounds nobody would call easy.

03 · THE REASON

The theory never left

I was that poor piano student. But I loved synthesizers and Trance, I never forgot my music theory, and I could always read music — so the arpeggiator became my way in: easy mode first, then finding every way to crank the knobs into something crazy. TRILL is that door, rebuilt from scratch and left open: an arpeggiator with the theory wired in, a synth engine (SYRINX) singing under it, and a bounce that lands the pattern straight on a CHIRP deck — where the knob-cranking really begins.

Under the feathers

What the bird can do

SYRINX inside — the voice engine: four curated patches (pad, pluck, bass, bell), one signal path live and offline.
No wrong notes, provably — eight scales plus three raga tables (Lalit, Bairagi, Bhairavi); every chord tone in-scale by construction, checked exhaustively by ?selftest=1.
Patterns on rails — up, down, up-down, random; one to three octaves; triads, 7ths, 9ths.
Rates on the clock — 1/4 to 1/32 with triplets, booked by a lookahead scheduler that keeps time even when the UI stutters.
The PACE gate — rests carved into the flight: offbeat, gallop, tresillo, the classic trance chop, or hand-carve your own sixteen cells.
Latch, on by default — one tap and it's already alive; the wire shows the sequence perched, note by note.
TONE & PITCH — one macro over every voice's filter, and a ±100¢ trim to lean the whole bird against a deck track that isn't quite A440.
Seam-folded WAV bounce — loop-perfect, tail folded into the head; drop it in CHIRP's Beats and PERCH finds the grid.
Deliberately dry — no reverb, no delay; the booth adds the space. Studio → booth is the whole flywheel.
One self-contained file — runs from file://, seven Aviary themes, SPARK is home.

Easy mode was never cheating — the theory was always the instrument. The arpeggiator just gave it hands.

Pick a scale. Tap a pad. Crank it.

It's one self-contained HTML file. Nothing to install — and it won't let you play a wrong note.

1. Open trill.html 2. Pick a root & scale 3. Tap a pad — latch holds it 4. Chop the PACE, bounce → CHIRP