POINTCAST · MUSIC
Listen. Understand. Play. Create. Graduate.
A music app made of Nouns. Six phases, ten pages, one walk-through. Built over four nights in May 2026.
10
PAGES
8
NOUN ARTISTS
21
STARS TO EARN
18+
PRE-BUILT SONGS
The shape of it
It started as a synthesized drum kit and grew into an app you can take a walk through. Listen opens at /cast-music-pro — UI polish, animated album art, lyric tickers — and runs through /cast-studio (synth-engine depth, 8-bar arrangements, a real mastering bus) to /cast-real, which loads actual recorded instrument samples from a CDN so each Noun artist gets a real trumpet or real flute.
Understand takes you backward into the physics: ten Web Audio lessons at /drum-academy, each hosted by a different Noun teacher. Stereo. Binaural beats. Waveforms and their harmonic signatures. AM, FM, reverb, compression, Karplus-Strong physical modeling, ADSR envelopes, filter sweeps. The synth-bass wobble explained from first principles.
Play hands you the controls. Seven mini-games at /drum-school: tap on the beat, identify chords by ear, hear an interval and name it, echo a rhythm, recognize a key, tap to estimate tempo, replay a melody on a piano keyboard. Each game awards up to three stars. 21 stars total to collect.
Create opens at /cast-make — a 4-bar tiny composer. Pick a Noun kit, sketch four chord changes, toggle drum hits on a 16-step grid, pick a lead phrase, hit play. Save three compositions to your browser. Share any as a URL. Render to a downloadable WAV. /cast-make-pro goes deeper: 8 bars, per-bar drum patterns, 4-level velocity, a swing slider, per-bar lead phrases, multi-track WAV+ZIP export, undo/redo, eight save slots.
Graduate at /cast-graduate. The page reads your stars from /drum-school and your compositions from /cast-make, awards you a rank (Apprentice → Novice → Player → Composer → Maestro), and shows you your graduating-class Noun — a Noun deterministically picked from your progress so it's the same one every time you visit.
Discover at /town-music: the landscape dashboard. Empty states for newcomers. Stats and rankings if you've played. A journey-map visualization showing where you've been. Plus /music.json for agents and downstream tooling.
Under the hood
AUDIO
Web Audio API end-to-end. Oscillators, buffer sources, biquad filters, convolution reverb, dynamics compression, soft-clip waveshaping, stereo panners. No external libraries except soundfont-player for the real-samples page.
SCHEDULER
All sequenced pages route through src/lib/audio-scheduler.ts — a 100-line shared lib. trackSource() registers nodes for cleanup. schedule() parks timers across pause/resume. Fixed three real bugs Codex caught in review.
STATE
Everything persists to the device's localStorage. No server, no account. Keys are namespaced (pc-ds-stars, pc-make-slot-1, etc.) and defensively parsed — corrupted storage falls back to defaults.
EXPORT
Compositions render to WAV via OfflineAudioContext. 16-bit stereo PCM. The encoder matches the live ctx.sampleRate so exported files sound identical to the preview.
