Reach

Reach is a drone the planet is playing. Air pressure sets the pitch it sings on. Temperature sets how bright it is. Wind becomes breath and gusts, cloud cover muffles it, and the tide rolls slow swells through the whole thing. None of that triggers anything — it drifts the way weather drifts, and it never stops.

Things land on top of it. Every earthquake on earth in the past hour, and every active National Weather Service alert in the country. A quake's magnitude is how loud it is, and its depth sets the pitch — shallow ones short and high, deep ones long and low, which is roughly how they actually feel. Alerts arrive by severity; an Extreme sits nearly an octave above a Minor. At 3am when nothing is happening anywhere, the bed is still there. That split is deliberate.

Day and night. Reach knows whether the sun is up where it's listening, and slides through dawn and dusk rather than flipping. As it gets dark the top of the bed thins out until there's little left but the root and the fifth, something low opens up underneath, the wind drops back and goes hollow, and every drift and swell in the patch slows to about a third of its daytime pace. A Reach left running overnight is not the same instrument at 3am that it was at noon.

Dryness. Humidity sets how the bands ring. Dry air and they ring long and brittle, close to glass. Wet air and they damp out short and thick. It's on the keys too. Kansas goes the whole way across that in a single day.

K1 Root · 45–360 Hz, the pitch the world sings on

K2 World · how much the planet is allowed to move things. All the way down is a drone you just play; all the way up, the world has the wheel.

K3 Tone · dark to bright — the bed and the keys

K4 Ring · airy wind up to singing glass, and how long quakes and alerts ring out

AUX · a latch. The world stops changing and what you're hearing is caught in an endless wash; the bed sinks under it and the keys play on top.

The keys are four breathy voices, and they always play.

You need an Organelle on wifi. Nothing to sign up for. Point it somewhere else by changing two numbers and a tide station ID at the top of reach.py.

If a feed dies, nothing happens — each one holds its last good value, and every data-driven multiplier has a hard floor, so no value arriving, or arriving as garbage, can mute the instrument. With no internet at all you get the bed on its defaults and the keyboard.

Data: NOAA Tides & Currents, USGS earthquakes, National Weather Service.