Play it. Keys A to K on your keyboard, with W E T Y U for the black notes.

Moth-8

A synthesizer the size of a paperback, with eight voices and no menus. The one on this page is real. It runs in your browser, so stop reading and press a key.

Tone opens the wing.

One knob sweeps a warm filter from a closed murmur to a bright, reedy edge. There is no envelope page to get lost in, because the harder you play the further it opens.

Drift is the part nobody else ships.

Each of the eight voices wanders slightly out of tune, on its own slow schedule, the way old oscillators do when the room warms up. Turn it down for a clean instrument, or turn it up and let a chord go gently seasick.

Four sounds come loaded.

Pick one, then ruin it with the knobs.

Wing Beat plays for you.

Hold a chord and it turns into an eight-step pattern at a slow flutter. Handy when you would like to hear what you are doing to the knobs.

On paper

Voices8, each with two oscillators
FilterResonant low-pass, velocity to cutoff
SpaceA stereo echo into a plate reverb
BodyRecycled ABS and an aluminium plate
PowerUSB-C, or three AA cells for about nine hours
The instrument above is a real synthesizer written with the Web Audio API. Specifications are illustrative. Design by Pencil of Nature.