See a chord, hear a shape. Two tones, drawn against each other. Pick a path below — learn how tuning works, breathe with the sound, or let it play itself. You'll always see which path you're on and exactly what it's doing. Sound starts on your click.
You're on · BreatheTwo calm tones, gently swelling. Breathe in as the sound rises, out as it falls.
vol
sit
Tone
Timbre
Register
Pitch220 Hz
Timbre changes how much a chord beats — Pure barely, Rich a lot. Register shifts the octave. These shape every path.
Look
The two tones, traced against each other
Idle
Breathe in
▶ Press start to hear the two tones
everything is silent until you do
the pen — where both tones are, right now its recent trail — the figure
Nearest simple ratio · low : high
3 : 2
Perfect fifth
The pretzel. Three humps one way, two the other.
0.0
Hz — the beat you hear, right now.
Perfectly in tune: 0 beats · the figure holds still.
low tone 220.0 Hzhigh tone 330.0 Hz
1Start from an interval
These drop you exactly on an interval — frozen figure, calm sound.
2Then tune it by hand
The sliders let you drift off an interval — that's where the motion and the beat live.
unison4th5thoctave
pulls the slider toward in-tune spots
−30¢in tune+30¢
Land on an interval above, then nudge here: at the unison or octave the beat you hear and the figure's turn are the same number; richer intervals turn once every few beats.
3Hear the piano's compromise
A piano splits the octave into 12 equal steps, so its fifth is 27/12 ≈ 1.4983 — deliberately not 3:2. Toggle and watch: the pure fifth holds still, the piano's slowly turns. Musicians know equal temperament beats; almost none have seen it.
4Build a chord
Three tones at once. Major and minor share their fifth — the entire mood difference is the middle tone: 5:4 (major) vs 6:5 (minor). The bright weave is that root-to-third fingerprint; the faint curves are the chord's other two intervals.
Timbre, register and pitch live in the Tone bar up top — they shape every path. Touching the pitch or detune sliders hands control back to you.
Your chord · held steady & consonant
3 : 2
Perfect fifth
A steady open drone — nothing sharp, nothing beating.
6
breaths / min — in as the sound rises, out as it falls.
One breath every 10.0 seconds.
1Choose a calm chord
All consonant — the figure stays still. Pick whichever sits best in your ear.
2Choose your pattern
Even is a smooth tide at a pace you set. Box and 4-7-8 are counted patterns with holds — the sound rises, waits, and falls with you.
4 (slower)68 (faster)
3Binaural — an experiment, with headphones
One tone in each ear, offset by a few hertz — your brain manufactures a slow beat that isn't in the room. The research on effects is small and mixed; treat it as an experiment, not a treatment. Headphones required — on speakers the tones just mix in the air. The figure shows the true left-vs-right trace, slowed 8× for comfort.
2712
What this does, honestly: it gives your breath a steady thing to follow. Slow breathing near six a minute is associated with a calmer, more settled state in controlled studies. The tone isn't doing anything to your body — your breath and attention are. The sound is just a metronome you can hear and see. And the swell rides the audio engine's own clock, so it keeps breathing even if you switch tabs and do something else while you sit.
Now playing · a gentle interval
1 : 1
Unison
Two tones at rest.
1Let it wander
The chord eases from one consonant interval to the next on its own. Nothing to tune — just watch and listen.
restlessvery slow
next in 12s
2Add a gentle pulse
Optional — the chord softly swells at a tempo you set. A rhythm, nothing more.
soft rise & fall
40 (slow)70100
A calm object to rest your eyes and ears on — like a slow tide, or a lava lamp made of sound. It makes no claim to do anything; it's just pleasant to sit with.
Tradition tone · exact frequency
639 Hz
Heart · Anahata
Openness — toward others and yourself.
1Choose a tone
Each is a solfeggio frequency the tradition pairs with a chakra. The dot is that tradition's own colour.
2Add a gentle pulse
Optional — the drone softly swells at a tempo you set. A rhythm, nothing more.
soft rise & fall
40 (slow)70100
Honestly: these frequency-and-chakra pairings come from modern sound-healing practice — the solfeggio set was popularised by Joseph Puleo in the 1990s. It isn't ancient, and no specific frequency has been shown to heal or change the body. What settles you is your own attention and breath; the tone is simply an anchor to rest them on. The figure isn't frozen, either: the upper tone is mistuned by 1/40th of a hertz, far too slow to hear as a wobble — so the shape quietly wheels through its family, one turn every 40 seconds. Something to watch the way you'd watch a mobile turn. The chosen tone fixes the pitch, so the Pitch slider rests here — Register still shifts it by octaves (handy for the higher tones), and Timbre and Reverb apply.
Why stillness means consonance
Two tones playing together add up, moment by moment, to a single wiggling pressure. When their frequencies are in a simple whole-number ratio, that combined wiggle repeats on a short, tidy loop — and a short loop is what the ear reads as one steady sound. Draw the same two tones at right angles instead, and the short loop shows up as a closed, unmoving figure. The stillness in your eye and the calm in your ear are the same fact, seen twice.
Push one tone slightly off and there's no short loop where both waves meet back up, so the figure can't close — it slowly turns, and your ear hears the near-miss as a swelling and fading beat. The turning you see and the wobble you hear are the very same mistuning. At the unison and octave they're the same number; at a richer interval the beat is faster (it's the clash between shared overtones), so the figure turns once every couple of beats.
The tones here carry a few soft overtones, because pure sine waves would look right but barely wobble. Engineers used the visual half of this for a century: Jules Antoine Lissajous bounced light off tuning-fork mirrors in 1857 to see whether two tones matched. What's new is putting sound and shape in one frame so the idea lands either way you think.
Where this shows up — oscilloscopes, stereo mixes, and the piano's built-in compromise+
01 / OSCILLOSCOPE
Freeze it to tune it
Feed one tone to a screen's horizontal axis and another to the vertical and you get this figure. Engineers matched an unknown frequency to a known one by adjusting until the shape stood still — the trick you're doing by eye in the first path.
02 / STEREO
The same picture, for mixes
Plot a track's left channel against its right and this becomes a vectorscope — the phase meter producers watch. Same engine, different signal. A working tool is one step from this toy.
03 / THE PIANO
Why every fifth beats a little
A piano's fifth isn't a pure 3:2 — it's 27/12 ≈ 1.4983, tuned deliberately off so all twelve keys share the octave. So every interval but the octave slowly turns. (Now live — section 3 of Tune by eye.)
