Morphogen: a theremin made of chemistry

There is a theremin hiding inside a pan of dye.

The instrument calls itself MORPHOS: a living field. A 4K-class Gray–Scott reaction-diffusion simulation you play with your fingers, with the phone's motion sensor, or with a mouse in any modern browser. First touch voices an overtone chant in the current key; lift the finger and it recedes. Silent until touched.

The sound is spatial. Sit with headphones on and the glass becomes a table in front of you — height is pitch, left and right is azimuth, press is loudness. Two fingers make two voices. Default is a warm sine in D Dorian, the chant band between 125 and 501 hertz, with a low mode that opens down to 7.83 hertz, the Schumann resonance.

The chemistry is the instrument. Species buttons morph the reaction in place instead of reseeding it: feed and kill rates, diffusion of u and v, all bound to the equation on screen. Freeze holds the last pitch as a sustained tone you can play over; release peels a layer off. Nine species packs, a handful of waveforms, keys and modes, optional vibrato. Undo even works.

Out of the browser it talks to projectors through TouchDesigner over a WebSocket, or MIDI CCs 20 to 29 if that is more your rig. It ships as TypeScript with a WebGL2 renderer, packaged for Vercel, and the public instrument runs at morphos.grok.me.

A theremin made of chemistry, and it fits in a browser tab. https://github.com/IAmM3ta/morphogen

■ Filed from The Foundry: the tools wing of the city.