EXP·016 Breath — the series' first non-pointer input: a bed of dying embers on canvas that you revive by blowing into your microphone; breath becomes wind and oxygen, embers flare toward white, sparks rise, a soft crackle answers

Design Lab · Experiment 016 · breath

Blow on the embers.

Fifteen experiments listened to your pointer. This one listens to you. Enable the microphone and blow — your breath becomes wind and oxygen. The dying coals flare from red toward white, sparks lift off the bed, and a faint crackle answers. Stop, and it all settles back to a glow.

mic off

your audio is analysed as a single loudness number, locally, in this tab — never recorded, stored, or sent anywhere. no mic? press and hold the coals to work the bellows.

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[00]The hearth

the series' first input that isn't a pointer

Input
microphone RMS · one loudness number per frame, nothing else read, nothing kept · noise suppression is turned off, because a breath is exactly the noise it removes
Embers
~240 coals on a bed · each carries a heat value that oxygen raises and time cools
Colour
coal → ember → white-hot · blackbody-ish ramp driven purely by heat
Sparks
hot coals shed rising sparks · your breath is the updraft that carries them
Sound
synthesized crackle — filtered noise pops, no audio files · answers only when you blow
Fallbacks
🟢 graceful · mic denied → press-and-hold bellows · blocked in an embed → the meter says so and links out · reduced motion → still hearth
[01]Six sparks

what it takes to make a page feel breathed on

01 · one number

Breath is just loudness

The whole input is the microphone's RMS level, smoothed. Blowing across a mic is broadband noise — loud, sustained, unmistakable. No speech, no pitch, no cleverness needed.

02 · oxygen

Heat in, cooling out

Every coal runs the same equation: breath raises heat, time lowers it. The fire is a leaky bucket.

03 · the ramp

Colour is temperature

Coal-brown to orange to white-gold, one lerp. Your eye already knows this scale from every fireplace it's ever seen — the physics is borrowed perception.

04 · consent

The mic is a gift

Nothing activates until you press the button, the meter shows exactly what's heard, and the fine print says what happens to it: one number, this tab, gone every frame.

analysed · not recorded
05 · palette

Char and fire

Soot ground, three heats.

06 · intimacy

Why breath beats a button

A click is a decision; a breath is a gesture your body already knows. Leaning into a screen to blow on coals — and watching them answer — collapses the distance between you and the page more than any hover effect ever has.

[02]Draught

drag the slider · a standing airflow through the room, under your breath · feeds the hero hearth too · this bed accepts breath and bellows as well

draught 12
Field note: in the Kuickr reader this page runs in a sandboxed frame, where a page can't open the microphone itself. It now asks the trusted Kuickr shell (data-kuickr-capabilities: microphone-level) which captures the mic and passes back only a loudness number — never raw audio. Opened directly, it falls back to the browser's own microphone. Either way noise suppression is off — a breath is exactly the sustained broadband noise that filter deletes.