Open a piano and the mechanism is right there — hammer, string, damper, felt. Press a key slowly enough and you can watch the precise event that makes the sound. Learning to play and learning how the thing works turn out to be closely related activities. The instrument teaches you about itself while you use it.

Electroacoustic sound broke that relationship, and R. Murray Schafer gave one part of the break a name: schizophonia, the split between an original sound and its reproduction [1]. He was writing about recording. The split kept widening after him. A great deal of music software now arrives as a box with a result on the far side, and the newest generative tools take the arrangement to its conclusion — a prompt goes in, finished music comes out, and the mechanism between them is hidden and owned by someone else.

My problem with this isn't that it's too easy. Easy is good. A low floor is the point.

My problem is that hidden mechanism makes a particular kind of learning impossible. You can't build intuition about a process you're never allowed to watch. You can develop taste in the results and preferences among the outputs, but the relationship stays consumer-shaped.

Most of what we built this past month is, from a certain angle, one long argument with that arrangement. It arrives by degrees.

The shallowest degree is being able to see it. Orbiters run on a new sound engine — you can stretch an audio without dragging its pitch along, play it backwards, break it into grains with granular synthesis. What matters to me more than the list is that every effect now has its own visual behaviour in the scene. The grains you hear have something to look at. You can see what you're hearing, and after a while you start to anticipate it.

A degree further is being able to set it. The home feed became something you choose rather than something chosen for you: four modes behind a switcher in the corner — a blend, strict chronology, what people are playing, and older work you may have missed. It runs on counts we already had. There's no new tracking, and no profile of you assembled in the background to guess what you'd like. The ordering is a decision you make, and you can change it in a second.

The last degree took us years to reach, and we reached it this month. Plantasia Space is open source.

Orbiters and Entangled Worlds — the applications themselves, not a demonstration of them — are public on GitHub. So is the runtime they share: the Three.js rendering, and the clock that holds everything in time. So is the design system. All of it at github.com/plantasia-space.

The licences are where the intention actually sits, and they aren't the same on purpose. The shared libraries are MIT — take them, build something unrelated, owe us nothing. The instruments are AGPL — build on them, and your version stays open too. One is a gift. The other is a condition. An instrument you can open should stay openable.

I want to be accurate about what this is, because "open source" gets announced more often than it gets practised. The repositories are public and licensed. The contributor documentation isn't written yet. Nobody has forked anything, and nobody has sent a patch. What exists today is permission — the rest is a practice, and practices take longer than releases.

There's a smaller thing I'm equally attached to. Every orbiter anyone had already made plays exactly as it did before. New engine underneath, no broken instruments on top. What people built stays theirs, in working order.

None of this makes anyone a better musician on its own. Visible mechanism is a precondition, not a method.

But an instrument you can open outlives the people who made it. A piano keeps working whether or not its manufacturer is still in business, because anyone can take the lid off and understand what's inside. That's the property I want this to have — a mechanism you can inspect, rather than a company you have to trust.

The lid is off. What would you do with it?

References​

[1] R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (1977)

Not in the rhetorical sense — in the structural one. When you place sounds next to each other, you're making a claim about proximity. The sequence implies something. The gaps do too.

R. Murray Schafer, writing about acoustic environments, described soundscapes as shaped rather than neutral — every element standing in relation to every other [1]. What you choose to hold together changes what each piece means. Curation, even informal curation, is an interpretive act.

Plantasia Space was built on a version of this logic from the start. The rX manifesto puts it directly: "every listen is a creative gesture that changes the world." Not passive reception. A gesture.

What shipped between January and June extends that gesture into new territory.

The first version of Entangled World Studio is available to create clips from your entangled worlds. Clips are now in the main feed and in search.

Collections arrive as a public layer — audios, worlds, and Orbiters in the same set, reorderable, findable from a profile. Curation lands in the garden.

Comments and reactions arrive across content. You can react to something, get into a conversation about it. Notification controls let you decide how much of that reaches you — not everything needs to follow you home, and knowing that changes how you show up.

The tools that let you leave — account deletion, direct download, a copyright report path — are part of this too. A room you can walk out of is one you enter differently.

None of these are additions to what Plantasia Space is. They're extensions of what it was already about: that listening, organizing, reacting, and deciding how present you want to be are all forms of participation.

The manifesto describes "every sound as a seed entrusted to the community." A collection is one of the ways that trust takes shape — named and placed where someone might find it.

What would it mean if every listener were also, quietly, a curator?

References​

[1] R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (1977)

Together with Gabriel Vigliensoni, electronic music artist, performer, and researcher working at the intersection of sound-making and machine learning, Plantasia Space is shaped by a long-term collaboration that began in 2006. Their shared practice brings together artistic exploration, sound experimentation, and advanced research in music technology, forming a vision where creative practice meets technical innovation.

Here we propose a playground for listening and creation: a space where each xPlorer can launch sounds, publish them, place them inside entangled worlds, and transform them using orbiters — tools that invite play, exploration, and real-time regeneration of sound. Each audio is published so it can be listened to, re-created, and reshaped into new forms by the community.

Plantasia Space is grounded in the idea that listening is not a passive act: it is a way of relating to others, to the environment, and to oneself. For this reason, the project aims to move away from a one-directional, consumption-driven listening experience, proposing instead an open, participatory, living practice where imagination and technology meet to form new sonic dimensions. Regenerative music is not only tied to the regeneration of music itself, but also to the question of how, from within the music industry, we can work in an accountable way — introducing a model that is being designed to work in balance between stakeholders, including landscape (nature + human wellbeing) in the equation.

This project invites us to explore together, to create, and to regenerate possible worlds through sound, sustaining a community that values curiosity, play, and diverse ways of listening.

With love. 𝐵𝓇𝓊𝓃𝒶.

“Sound is the ‘voice’ of a society, of a landscape, of an environment. If we understand the meanings of sound we understand what a place, a society is saying about itself. If we understand the behaviour of sound we can hear how a society behaves towards its environment.” — Hildegard Westerkamp’s official writings archive.

In honor of Morton S. “Mort” Garson, a Canadian composer, arranger, songwriter, and pioneer of electronic music, best known for albums from the 1960s and 1970s such as Mother Earth's Plantasia.