Pass

Pass is a drone you play with the keys. Somewhere over your head the ISS is going round the planet at five miles a second, and Pass is following it — a real position, updated every five seconds, from wherever it actually is right now.

The station has a voice in there: a faint high tone two octaves above the last note you played, so it's always in key. Far away it's quiet and hides in the echo. As it comes closer it gets clearer — about nineteen decibels between the far side of the planet and straight overhead. Coming toward you it sits a hair sharp; going away it sags flat. And the whole 92-minute lap opens and closes the overtones under everything: darkest when it's on the other side of the world, brightest when it's over your roof. When it crosses your horizon a fifth swells in underneath and fades out over half a minute.

Most of the time that's a slow thing happening beneath your playing, over an hour and a half. If you want to hear the orbit itself, hold AUX.

K1 Tone · filter

K2 Bend · an octave down to an octave up, on held notes too

K3 Orbit · how much of the station you let in. 0 = none of it

K4 Space · bottom half its own echo, top half a wide stereo wash with a tail that rings on

AUX tapped — hold. Play, latch, let go: the notes keep sounding and you keep playing over them.

AUX held about a second — the sky races. The station drops two octaves into the range you're actually playing, a full lap takes 25 seconds instead of 92 minutes, and the Doppler becomes about a tone and a half of real bend — sharp coming at you, flat going over, dead in tune the instant it's overhead. All of it through a low pass gate that can't hold itself open: it sags, it dips, sometimes it stutters, and it struggles back. The two latches are independent, so you can have the hold, the racing, both, or neither.

You need an Organelle on wifi. No API key, no SSH, nothing to sign up for — the follower starts and stops with the patch. Not in Kansas? Open pass.py and change two numbers. It plays perfectly well with no internet at all; the station just stops moving it.

ISS position from wheretheiss.at, with Open Notify as backup.