{"builds_on":null,"cover":"https://wowbuffetfiles.com/f/RhzuPirMki8DpFfD.jpg","credit":"\u201cGlass Armonica\u201d by @jay88 on Wow Buffet, made with Claude Opus 5.5. CC BY 4.0. https://wowbuffet.com/p/seniXft1","description":"Benjamin Franklin's 1761 glass armonica: 37 glass bowls nested on a turning spindle, each rim painted the colour of its note. Touch a rim and it sings, slide across the rims to glide, and use more fingers (or Shift) for chords. Your keyboard plays it too. Take the tour to hear the opening of Mozart's Adagio K. 356, which he wrote for this instrument, or play along as notes fall onto the rims. The sound is synthesised from each bowl's vibration modes.","download":"https://wowbuffet.com/p/seniXft1/download","effort":"Max","file":"https://wowbuffetfiles.com/f/aabEaEVpjO5RlJ6o.html","file_name":"armonica.html","file_size":109084,"hand_edits":"none","id":"seniXft1","json":"https://wowbuffet.com/p/seniXft1.json","licence":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"likes":0,"link":null,"made_on":null,"maker":{"name":"jay88","url":"https://wowbuffet.com/u/jay88","username":"jay88"},"minutes":90,"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","prompt":"One Shot - Build \"Glass Armonica\": Benjamin Franklin's 1761 instrument. It is 37 glass bowls nested on a spinning iron rod. Touch a rim and that bowl sings. Make it the most beautiful glass instrument on the web: glass glowing on black like a museum piece, and a sound so soft and pure that people play it with their eyes closed.\r\n\r\nWrite it as a historical instrument maker, an acoustician and a top creative technologist. Every number must be correct, and say on screen what is simplified. ONE object, ONE gesture: polish beats features.\r\n\r\n## Technical rules\r\n\r\n- ONE self-contained HTML file. Load three.js through a pinned import map: `https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/three@0.170.0/build/three.module.js`, with `three/addons/` mapped to the same version's `examples/jsm/`. Use Inter from Google Fonts. Make no other network calls, and use no image, HDR or audio files.\r\n- It runs in a sandboxed iframe that can be 0\u00d70 at load. Use a ResizeObserver, never throw on a zero size, and use no alert(). Wrap localStorage in try/catch.\r\n- It works from a 360px phone up to desktop. Choose the layout by aspect ratio, so a 672\u00d7432 frame and a 9:16 phone both keep a big stage. In portrait, look down so the rod runs top to bottom, and keep every rim at least about 18 px deep.\r\n- Support mouse, multi-touch and keyboard.\r\n- Run at 60 fps with devicePixelRatio capped at 2. Pause when the tab is hidden and respect reduced motion.\r\n- Seed all randomness. No TODOs and no console errors.\r\n\r\n## The instrument (Franklin's own specification)\r\n\r\n- **Bowls.** There are 37 hemispherical bowls in 25 sizes, from 9 inches (22.9 cm) across down to 3 inches (7.6 cm), in quarter-inch steps. Each has a central neck fixed on a polished iron spindle.\r\n- **Nesting.** Each bowl's mouth faces the treble end. Each smaller bowl sits inside the next larger one, with about an inch (2.5 cm) of its brim showing beyond. That gives about a metre of overlapping rims, largest and lowest at the left.\r\n- **Spin.** The spindle turns steadily, about once a second, as a foot treadle would drive it. Show only two slim bearing posts and a small polished flywheel at the bass end. The spin is silent.\r\n- **Rim colours.** Franklin painted the visible inner band of each bowl by its note:\r\n  - C red\r\n  - D orange\r\n  - E yellow\r\n  - F green\r\n  - G blue\r\n  - A indigo\r\n  - B purple\r\n  - every sharp and flat white\r\n\r\n  This is the only colour in the scene, so make it a soft, translucent band of paint just inside each rim.\r\n- **Tuning.** The range is G3 to G6, chromatic. The 37 bowls share 25 sizes, so same-size bowls differ in thickness: thicker glass sings higher (pitch follows thickness \u00f7 diameter\u00b2).\r\n  - Anchor: the 9-inch bowl is 2.7 mm thick and sings G3 (196 Hz).\r\n  - Give every bowl a size and a thickness between 2.4 and 3 mm that obeys this rule. The 3-inch bowl sings G6 at about 2.4 mm.\r\n\r\n## The look\r\n\r\n- **Camera.** View from the player's seat, a little above, looking along the nested rims, like a museum photograph. A slow drift is allowed only in the tour.\r\n- **Thin glass.** Bowls are 2.4 to 3 mm thick, with a fire-polished, rounded lip.\r\n  - Thin walls barely refract, and three.js transmission can't see other transmissive objects, so the nested bowls would vanish. Instead, render the glass as alpha-blended physical material with strong Fresnel reflections.\r\n  - Draw back faces first, then front faces, sorted bowl by bowl.\r\n  - The rims carry the brightest highlights.\r\n- **Light.** Use a custom PMREM studio: a black room with two long, narrow softbox strips and a small kicker, so every rim shows a crisp line of light. Use no shadow maps; give the spindle a faint reflection on the floor.\r\n- **Dark mode** (default): black, with the glass glowing at its edges. **Light mode:** a white gallery, with the glass showing grey edges.\r\n- **Showing the spin.** Perfect bowls look still when they spin. Add tiny seed bubbles in the glass and a slightly hand-painted, uneven edge on each colour band, so you can see them turn. The reflections stay put.\r\n- **Singing.** A singing bowl's colour band brightens and a soft light blooms along its rim, following the loudness. When it stops, the light fades with the sound.\r\n\r\n## The gesture: touch a rim\r\n\r\n- Press and hold on any exposed rim and that bowl sings. The sound swells in over about 0.3 s, holds while you hold, and rings away over a few seconds when you lift.\r\n- Slide across the rims to glide from note to note. Every rim under your finger sings, which is the satisfying gesture.\r\n- Multi-touch plays chords of up to five notes. With a mouse, holding Shift latches notes on, so you can build a chord.\r\n- A soft dot of light marks each point of contact on the rim.\r\n- The computer keyboard plays it like a piano:\r\n  - A W S E D F T G Y H U J K covers C to C.\r\n  - Z and X shift the octave.\r\n  - Holding a key sustains its note.\r\n- Readouts in small Inter caps show the last note played: NOTE (e.g. \"E5\"), FREQUENCY, BOWL (diameter and thickness) and RIM SPEED (m/s).\r\n\r\n## Sound: the most important part\r\n\r\nKeep it soft, pure and ASMR-calm. Nothing is harsh, and nothing above about 5 kHz stands out. Sound starts on the first touch.\r\n\r\n- **The modes.** A rubbed bowl sings in its lowest bending mode: the rim flexes into an oval and back. Each voice is made of its modes as sine partials:\r\n  - the main note f, split into two partials 0.3 to 1.5 Hz apart (seeded per bowl), so it shimmers with a slow beat, as real glass does\r\n  - a partial at 2.83 f, about \u221218 dB\r\n  - a partial at 5.42 f, about \u221230 dB, dropped when it lies above 5 kHz\r\n\r\n  These ratios come from Rayleigh's thin-shell formula, n(n\u00b2 \u2212 1)/\u221a(n\u00b2 + 1) for n = 2, 3, 4.\r\n- **Bowed grain.** While a rim is touched, add a slight random amplitude flutter (about \u00b13% at 20 to 40 Hz) and a whisper of finger hush (soft low-passed noise, around \u221240 dB relative). That is the wet finger sticking and slipping.\r\n- **Decay.** When released, a bowl rings away with T60 from about 6 s for the largest bowl to 2.5 s for the smallest.\r\n- **Room.** Add a soft generated hall reverb, a ConvolverNode with a decaying-noise impulse response of about 2.5 s, around 25% wet.\r\n- **Level.** Keep the master at about \u221220 dBFS RMS under a gentle limiter, and allow up to eight voices without clipping.\r\n- **Tuning.** Use equal temperament with A4 = 440 Hz, and say so in the facts.\r\n\r\n## Look and feel\r\n\r\n- Gallery-minimal: square corners, hairline borders, tiny uppercase Inter labels with wide tracking, and no UI colour.\r\n- A small GLASS ARMONICA wordmark top left.\r\n- A one-line caption narrates.\r\n- H hides all UI, for filming.\r\n\r\n## Facts (\"?\" panel)\r\n\r\nStart with a how-to line, then:\r\n- Benjamin Franklin invented it in 1761, after hearing Edward Delaval play musical glasses at Cambridge. He called it the armonica.\r\n- His had 37 bowls on an iron spindle turned by a foot treadle, from 9 inches across down to 3, with about an inch of each rim showing.\r\n- He painted each rim by its note: C red, D orange, E yellow, F green, G blue, A indigo, B purple, and every sharp and flat white.\r\n- The 37 bowls came in only 25 sizes. A bowl the same size but with thicker glass sings higher.\r\n- A wet finger sticks and slips on the turning rim once per vibration, hundreds of times a second, flexing the bowl into an oval and back.\r\n- Mozart played one at Franz Mesmer's house in 1773. In 1791 he wrote his Adagio and Rondo, K. 617, for the blind virtuoso Marianne Kirchgessner.\r\n- By the 1800s, rumours said its sound drove players and listeners mad, and some later blamed the lead in the glass. There is little evidence for either.\r\n- Simplified: tuned to modern equal temperament, G3 to G6. The sound is synthesised from each bowl's modes, not recorded.\r\n\r\n## Tour and first impression\r\n\r\nTAKE THE TOUR (T) runs 45 seconds, made for screen recording. Any interaction stops it. It plays, on the real rims with contact dots showing:\r\n- the \"Ah vous dirai-je, maman\" theme (the tune Mozart wrote variations on, K. 265, known in English as Twinkle Twinkle), in C, with soft held notes beneath\r\n- then one slow glide across all 37 rims, low to high, ringing away into silence\r\n\r\nThe camera drifts slowly along the bowls. Captions:\r\n1. \"Benjamin Franklin invented this in 1761.\"\r\n2. \"Each rim is painted the colour of its note.\"\r\n3. \"Mozart wrote music for it.\"\r\n4. \"Touch a rim.\"\r\n\r\nOn load, the bowls are already turning in the dark, the rims catching light. Caption: \"Touch a rim.\" Buttons: TAKE THE TOUR.\r\n\r\nKeys: the piano keys, Z and X for octave, T tour, M mute, H hide the UI, ? facts.\r\n\r\n## Do NOT add\r\n\r\n- no water trough, splashes or drips\r\n- no hands, people, case, wood or treadle pedal\r\n- no piano keyboard, sheet music or visualiser bars\r\n- no particles, bloom haze or gradients\r\n- no other instruments, music, recording or share buttons\r\n- no free orbit camera\r\n\r\nEvery sound comes from the bowls.\r\n\r\n## Output\r\n\r\nPlan the architecture briefly, then write the whole file from `<!doctype html>` to `</html>`. If you can run a browser, check these and fix what you see:\r\n- 360px portrait, 672\u00d7432 and desktop\r\n- light and dark mode\r\n- a 0\u00d70 frame\r\n- reduced motion\r\n- the tour\r\n- a five-note chord and a full glide for clipping\r\n\r\nIf you must trade scope, protect things in this order:\r\n1. the sound\r\n2. the glass and rim colours\r\n3. the touch gesture\r\n4. the tour\r\n\r\nFollow-up prompt:\r\nfor the tour could it have the mozart piece instead of little lamb, could the tour text be larger. Also the ? Info and controls needs better UI/UX so people udnerstand the key commands, perhaps even a guitar style hero - with the notes (keyboard keys to play a song)\r\n\r\nProcess: Claude Opus 5.5 built it in one session from the prompt above and tested it itself in headless Chrome: desktop, the 672\u00d7432 player, 360 px and 390 px phones, light and dark, a 0\u00d70 sandboxed iframe, reduced motion, the tour, and chords and glides measured for clipping (no clipping; about \u221220 dBFS per note). The follow-up swapped the tour tune for the first eight bars of Mozart's Adagio in C for glass harmonica, K. 356, transcribed from the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, and added the How to play panel and the Play Along mode. No hand edits.","published":"2026-10-11T05:33:29+00:00","social":null,"tags":["music","instrument","glass","history","mozart","physics","relaxing","game"],"taste_test":null,"title":"Glass Armonica","tokens":null,"type":"3d","updated":"2026-10-11T05:33:29+00:00","url":"https://wowbuffet.com/p/seniXft1","views":15,"website":null}