Overhead

Overhead — Four voices for the aircraft actually above you. Four for your hands.

Overhead reads the sky over your house — real aircraft, live, right now — and plays them. Altitude becomes pitch, so a cruising jet sits high and something low and slow sits underneath it. Distance becomes level, fading out around a hundred nautical miles. Heading becomes pan: eastbound right, westbound left. Groundspeed opens the filter. The more of them there are, the thicker the bed underneath.

Everything glides over nine seconds, so planes slide rather than jump. It's thin at 3am and thick mid-morning. That's the piece.

The keys always play, sky or no sky — the same detuned pair of sines through the same filters, so your hands and the traffic are the same instrument.

K1 Spread · how far apart the planes sit in pitch — 0 gathers them into one cluster, full spreads them wide

K2 Drift · how unreliable the whole thing gets: random little slides, tape flutter that comes and goes, and low pass gate struggles where a plane sags quiet and dark and takes its time coming back. Your keys stay in tune whatever it does.

K3 Body · filter

K4 Air · the noise bed under everything

AUX · latches every plane down an octave in a slow dive. Press again to bring them up.

The screen shows the closest aircraft — callsign, distance, altitude — and what the sky is doing.

You need an Organelle on wifi. No API key, no SSH, nothing to sign up for; the reader starts and stops with the patch. Not in Kansas? Open overhead.py in any text editor and change two numbers at the top.

It will play differently at your house than it does at mine, and differently tonight than it did this morning. That's the whole idea.

Aircraft positions from adsb.lol and adsb.fi open data. Thanks to the volunteers who feed these networks.