TITLE
The Museum of Obsolete Sounds

PROMPT
A virtual gallery of sounds the world has stopped making, each exhibit synthesised live in the browser with Web Audio (no samples) and visualised as it plays. Concept: a museum where the artefacts are noises; each plinth holds a drawing of the object, a museum label, and a button that performs its sound.

Mood: clinical white-cube gallery, deadpan and affectionate. Palette: gallery white #FAFAF8, black #111111, International Klein-like electric blue #0047FF as the single accent (buttons, waveforms, highlights), and label grey #8C8C8C. Light page. Thin black line illustrations (SVG, single stroke weight, no fills except blue accents; the one exception is the television screen, which goes black for a second on switch-off so the white dot can be seen).

Layout: a long vertical gallery; the entrance wall has the museum name set very large in a tight neo-grotesk (Helvetica/Arial bold, sentence case, negative tracking) spanning the width, with "Permanent collection · Gallery 2 · Please touch.", an index of the nine exhibits, and above the name a single blue waveform that decays into a flat line (moving the pointer across it troubles it, silently, like a plucked string). Each exhibit is a wide row on an asymmetric grid: catalogue number huge and light (outlined) at left ("01"), the line drawing of the object on a plinth in the middle, the label at right (title, date range, medium: "sine waves, filtered noise", and 40–70 words of curatorial text), and, forming the front face of the plinth beneath the drawing, an oscilloscope strip that draws the live waveform and a small scrolling spectrogram in blue while the sound plays, with a status line naming the current phase of the sound. At rest the oscilloscope shows the sound's envelope as a thin black plot. On phones the row stacks.

Exhibits (9, each a carefully designed synthesis patch with envelopes, and each with a matching animation of its drawing): 01 Rotary telephone dial: wind-up ratchet and the returning pulse clicks, the count depending on which digit the viewer dials on the drawn dial (drag a hole to the finger stop, click a digit, or press a number key; the dial rotates back at constant speed, ten pulses a second, and a partial drag sends only the pulses it earned). 02 Dial-up modem handshake: a recognisable sequence of dial tone, DTMF digits, answer tone with phase reversals, warbling FSK tones, probing tones and chirps, and the wash of scrambled noise, about 10 seconds, with the label listing what each phase is doing and highlighting the current one. 03 Typewriter bell and carriage: keystrokes type a line onto the drawn paper while the carriage advances, the bell rings at the eleventh character, the carriage returns with a zip and a thud. 04 CRT television switching on: the high 15.6 kHz whine fading in (kept quiet), a degauss thump, static hiss; the drawing's screen fills with blue static and shows a shrinking white dot on switch-off. 05 Film camera: shutter click and motor wind, with a frame counter that reaches 36 and then rewinds. 06 Floppy disk drive seek: stepped buzzing head movements and a spin-up whirr, with a switch to make it "play" a rising scale as hobbyists did. 07 Cassette: the clunk of the play key, tape hiss, the wow of a tape starting (a computed tune on a variable-speed loop), fast-forward squeal. 08 Slide projector advancing: clunk-chunk and fan hum, cycling four line-drawn slides, one of them upside down. 09 The telephone time lady: not speech; instead "the pips": six sine pips at 1 kHz, five short and the last one long, synchronised so the long pip lands exactly on the next real ten-second boundary of the viewer's clock; the drawn clock shows the viewer's real time.

Signature moment: the modem. While its handshake plays, the oscilloscope strip widens to the full row and opens a large spectrogram that writes itself from left to right along a ten-second time axis (on phones it becomes a horizontal scroll that follows the playhead), with annotated brackets appearing in time with each phase ("it asks", "it answers", "they agree on a speed", "they stop talking to you and start talking to each other"), and the line drawing of the beige modem blinks its LEDs in sync, continuing to flicker silently after the speaker cuts off.

Interaction: sound is off until the viewer presses any exhibit's round blue play button or touches a drawing (this is the gesture that creates the AudioContext); a persistent master control in the corner shows a mechanical tally, a designed speaker icon with mute, a volume slider (default moderate) and a small level meter. Only one exhibit plays at a time; pressing again stops it. Each drawing is itself interactive (dial the phone, type on the keys, flip the TV switch, press the shutter, click the drive, press the cassette keys, click the projector for the next slide). Keyboard: buttons focusable, Space/Enter plays. A visitor counter styled as a mechanical tally ("You have heard 3 of 9") and, when all are heard, the exit wall reveals a final line: "Silence, 4′33″ of which is still under copyright elsewhere, is not in the collection."

Motion: restrained: label rules draw in from left when a row enters; drawings have one precise mechanical animation each. Reduced motion: oscilloscope shows a static envelope plot; drawings do not animate. Copy: precise and wry, like a great wall label: what made the sound, when it was last common, what replaced it.

DESCRIPTION
A white-cube gallery rendered as a long page: an entrance wall with the museum's name in enormous tight black grotesque under a single blue waveform that dies away into a flat line, then nine exhibit rows, each with a huge outlined catalogue number, a single-weight line drawing standing on a plinth, and a wall label written in a dry curatorial voice. The front face of every plinth is an instrument panel: a round blue button, an oscilloscope and a small spectrogram that show the sound actually being made at that moment. Nothing is recorded; a rotary dial, a modem handshake, a typewriter, a television, a camera, a floppy drive, a cassette, a slide projector and the time pips are all built from oscillators, filtered noise and envelopes, and each drawing performs one exact mechanical movement in step with its sound. The modem is the centrepiece: its plinth panel widens across the whole row and a large spectrogram writes itself out while brackets caption the conversation between the two machines. A mechanical tally counts what has been heard, and the exit wall keeps its last label in storage until all nine have played.

VISUAL TECHNIQUES
- Inline SVG line drawings with one non-scaling stroke weight, blue-only accents, and parts animated by transforms (rotating dial wheel, sliding carriage, iris, head carriage, reels, clock hands)
- Web Audio synthesis patches per exhibit: oscillators, band-passed noise bursts, pitch-dropping thumps, amplitude modulation, frequency-shift keying, a computed tune buffer with playback-rate automation for tape wow and fast-forward
- Live oscilloscope on canvas from an AnalyserNode with zero-crossing trigger and automatic gain, devicePixelRatio-aware
- Scrolling canvas spectrograms per exhibit with a frequency range chosen for each sound
- Full-row modem spectrogram written to an offscreen buffer and blitted with grid lines, playhead, time and frequency axes, and timed caption brackets revealed with clip-path
- Idle and reduced-motion envelope plots drawn from each patch's timing data
- Outlined display numerals using text stroke with paint-order, and very large negative-tracked grotesque headlines sized in viewport units
- Entrance waveform simulated as a damped string (1D wave equation) that reacts to pointer movement
- Television static drawn into a low-resolution pixelated canvas, and a CSS keyframed collapse of the picture into a line and then a dot
- Mechanical tally drums with overshoot easing, progress ring around each play button, level meter in the master control
- Rules and label text that draw in from the left via IntersectionObserver, with custom cubic-bezier easing throughout

INTERACTION MODEL
The page is silent until the viewer presses a round blue play button or touches a drawing; that gesture starts audio. Each play button performs its exhibit once, shows progress as a ring, and stops it if pressed again; starting another exhibit stops the current one, and leaving the tab stops everything. While a sound plays, the plinth panel shows its live waveform, a spectrogram and a status line naming each phase. The drawings are instruments: drag or click a hole on the rotary dial (or press a number key) and it winds, returns and clicks out that digit; type on the typewriter keys to print a line, ring the bell and return the carriage; flip the television's power switch on and off; press the camera's shutter until the roll ends at 36 and rewinds; click the floppy drive for a random seek or use the switch to make it play a scale; press the cassette's play, fast-forward and stop keys; click the projector to advance through four slides; click the clock to schedule the pips against the real time. Playing the modem widens its panel into a full-row spectrogram with captions; on phones that panel scrolls sideways after the playhead and can be dragged afterwards. A fixed control in the corner holds the tally of exhibits heard, a mute button, a volume slider and a level meter. Moving the pointer across the entrance waveform sets it vibrating without sound. When all nine exhibits have been heard, the final label appears on the exit wall. With reduced motion requested, drawings stay still and the oscilloscopes show static envelope plots.