dice falling into canyons

    Typed sentences draw from a giant database of sound. common object pairings, the things in one’s field of vision were the first to be tried. A stapler against the frame of a computer monitor, the edge of a sheet of paper scraping down the receiver of an office phone, and a cereal bowl against a tropical fish tank were the first searches recorded. if an item was not in the reasonably comprehensive database, the query also served as a request, in which a call was put out to document that sound, an exercise in crowdsourced collection.

Early on, a few users began exploring beyond their domestic and workplace settings. One visitor wanted to hear what a maine lobster’s claw sounded like against the keel of a particular ship. the ship database, which at first contained the bobbing crafts docked in a particular marina's waters, was now global and numbered in the thousands.

A search for the sounds of forks against plates, perhaps following a train of thought about lobsters, could be added to the ambiance of a sleepy town on a saturday morning, flags in front of houses. these types of locational additives were the next to trend within the service. the early, perhaps restive, users, the ones who first discovered location, were some of the first visitors to combine vacation spots, that is, to combine the atmosphere of places alone, with no particular object in mind — the wild energy of a marrakesh bazaar and a hawaiian lanai, combined produced an experience, described in the feedback form as “syrupy and golden, but not quite”. the feedback form, first used exclusively to report errors on the site, became a place where visitors reported their response to a particular combination, were sometimes commemorative, with entries like “The bells strung along these mountain steps in Japan remind me of her. Thank you for that.”

The feedback form also, possibly for this same batch of early explorers of the service, became an outlet for restlessness in visitors waiting for a particular sound, or for altogether new categories of sound to be added: appeals for ventilation systems or for different atmospheric pressures of rooms, to perhaps capture the sunbeam-mote stillness of lying on the carpet  daydreaming and other quiet moments. a desire for more fine-tuned weather sounds was also common. The sound after a summer rain–that is, of passing cars on glimmering wet roads–was possible, Many searchers were pleased at this new flexibility and capability of the platform, one that allowed them to articulate the feeling of a Sunday afternoon, among other things. sound families began to be mapped on the service. those car tires on wet roads were aurally connected to the sound of ocean surf, which, a few diagrammed lines away, were themselves connected to oil frying in a pan, sparklers in the twilight. in the case of sparklers + ocean surf, combinations with more overt connections glow together on-hover.

the service wasn’t without its limitations. the gentlest of breezes were hard to capture, especially on beaches or places without vertical features. On these windswept dunes, unless they were dotted by the punky vegetation that made the wind’s presence known, the sound was imperceptible --- unless one listened carefully for the whisper of a zephyr in the reeds. On pure expanses of white sand, aside from the miniature tumbling of crystals, these minute sensations were confined to personal experience---the wind grazing an exposed shoulder overlooking the sea, sending a tendril of hair underneath a hat momentarily aloft, or advancing across the smooth backs of vacationers, sundrowsed on their summer blankets.

the restless visitors were always operating on the edge of the platform's capabilities, pushing to expand the service into new realms. A visual editor was developed by a community member where entire scenes could be constructed whole cloth. Current weather conditions were selected, activated, and sent through the new landscape. A wind curved downward along hills and through a carefully placed barn, hay scattering everywhere, roosters briefly levitating in the slatted light at the pastoral disturbance.

 Some visitors began wanting to experience impossible hypotheticals, combinations unimaginable in the first iteration of the service. that same maine lobster, but in the acrid, hazy, pools of venus. portions of the community kept voting down this type of expansion, which relied on AI to generate likely sounds, citing that the lobster would not even survive in venus’ atmosphere. others firmly believed the service was purely a sandbox of the imagination and should be unencumbered by our terrestrial limitations.

the project was forked into two parallel services: one, the original platform restricted to the known, which still allowed for strange combinations, dice falling into canyons and the like, and a new platform, a service which contained the familiar sounds of the first, but also allowed impossible combinations, the sound of stardust + a human’s circulatory system, and explorations of synesthesia: the sounds of colors and vowels, of shadows. Some of the original visitors found this subjective guesswork, which they argued was at the mercy and whims of the AI's trainer, as wholly distasteful.

The new service maintainers, at first exhilarated beyond comprehension by the endless potential of these novel and exotic combinations, became weary from nights constantly training and retraining models of AI, AI that could not seem to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for more and more unlikely scenarios, and the distances between updates on the new platform grew further and further apart. Many users have returned to the original platform, which is still operational to this day.