GLIA · the guide

How to play it

Everything below is what the instrument at /glia actually does, in the order you meet it. Where a control does not exist, this says so and names what stands in for it.

What this is

Glia is a row of shader organisms bred by a machine at /rorschach, each one played as an instrument. The shader source is the whole organism: the picture on the glass is that shader running, and the key, the tempo and the timbre are read out of the same text, so nothing on the page was written for any one of them.

The screen is the instrument. There is no transport to arm, nothing to load and nothing to record: you strike the glass, the organism takes what you played into its own bar, and it goes on playing after your hands come off.

The first thirty seconds

Strike anywhere. The first touch is what starts the sound, because a browser will only open an audio clock inside a real gesture, and that same touch is also a note. It also asks the browser for fullscreen, twice at most; if the browser refuses, the square in the top right corner pulses three times to show where fullscreen has to be asked for by hand.

If the first strike is silent, the phone is muted or turned down. An iPhone's side switch silences this page. Headphones are worth using: much of the kick is below what a phone speaker can play.

Strike five or six more times in something like a rhythm. A bar is one lap of the loop, cut into sixteen slots, and your strike lands in the nearest one. There is nothing to press to make a loop.

Then play the same rhythm again, and that is when it starts coming back. A phrase played once is heard once: the slots you struck are kept, and drawn faintly on the glass so you can see where they are, and they make no sound of their own. Play the rhythm a second time and the slots you returned to start replaying every lap, at the exact distance off the beat you played them, so a shuffle comes back as a shuffle. That is the loop, and repeating is the whole of how you get one. More.

This is also what lets you solo. Play something different every bar and none of it is carried, on either half, however long you go on; play something twice and it is. A phrase you play once is not wasted while you are deciding: see what loops and what fades for the one thing it still does.

How hard you hit it is not kept. A replayed strike comes back at a level set by how firmly you have claimed the slot, so playing the same spot again is what makes it louder, not hitting it harder.

Then stop and listen. The organism carries on: its own drone, pad, wash and kit run bar after bar, and it plays more of them the emptier your bar is. If you want it quieter, fill more of the bar yourself, not less.

After four seconds with no touch, the controls, the foot links and the fullscreen corner dim almost to nothing so the picture is clear. They still work while dim, and they come back the moment you press one.

Notes and percussion

The screen is two instruments at once. On a touchscreen, the left half is the note keyboard and the right half is the drum kit. With a mouse, the left button plays notes and the right button plays drums, both over the whole screen. A stylus is not a finger: anything the browser reports as a pen falls through to the mouse rule and plays notes everywhere.

Which half you are on is decided the instant you touch down and does not change. A finger that starts on the notes half and slides past the centre line keeps playing notes.

A tap sounds one note, about six thousandths of a second after your finger lands, and that is the whole note. Holding still does nothing: no sustain, no build, no second sound. Lifting does nothing either.

A drag keeps playing. While the finger is down, crossing onto a different note or a different drum sounds it. Moving sideways alone is silent, because only height changes what you are on. Notes sounded this way are quieter than a struck one and always the same loudness, and they are not written into the loop: they sound once and never come back. If you are getting sounds you did not mean to play, this is usually why. A tap that does not move plays exactly one sound.

Height is pitch. The note half is the same five octaves on every organism, low at the bottom and high at the top, running from A1 at the bottom edge to A6 at the top. Middle C sits at about 55% of the way down the screen, a little below halfway. That is where the height names it, not where you can play it: the note that sounds is snapped to the organism's key and then to the chord holding underneath at that moment, so you cannot ask for one named note and get it. There is no chromatic mode. A gesture past the top or bottom edge stops at the last note there is.

That snapping is why nothing you play can be out of key, and it is worth saying plainly if what you are hearing sounds atonal: every note, struck, slid or replayed, is forced onto the scale and the chord before it sounds. What reads as wrong is usually the five-octave spread across a short screen, or the key moving under a loop you laid down earlier, which now happens about three times in ten minutes rather than about twenty.

The drums are four bands by height, laid out the way a drummer sits behind a kit. The bottom third of the screen is the kick, the middle third is a rack of toms, the band above that is the snare, and the top sixth is the hats. The bands are uneven on purpose, so halfway up is a tom and not a snare. Where you land inside a band colours the drum: which tom, how tight the snare, how open the hat, how deep the kick. For the deepest kick, strike the very bottom edge and strike it hard. Much of that kick is sub-bass a phone speaker cannot reproduce; on a phone you get the click and the body of it.

A strike aimed at the kick usually lands in the tom band above it instead. After each drum strike the band you actually hit lights up for about nine tenths of a second. That is the only time the layout is drawn.

How hard a hit sounds comes from the size of your fingertip on the glass, on devices that report it, and from how fast the mouse was moving when it arrived on a computer. Many phones report neither. There, and on a click from a standstill, every strike comes out at one loudness that rises only with how busy you already are. There is no velocity control.

Several fingers work at once, each its own gesture. On a touchscreen each half spans the full stereo field: the outer edge of the note half is hard left and the centre line is hard right; across the drums it runs the other way, centre line hard left out to hard right at the edge.

Tempo and form

There is no bpm box, no tempo slider and no tap-tempo button. The instrument takes the tempo out of the gaps between your strikes. Three strikes in a row are the minimum: one strike gives no gap to measure, two give one gap, and it says nothing until two gaps agree.

Before you have given it one, it has no tempo and does not pretend to. A fresh page breathes: the drone, the pad and the wash move, and not one of them is on a beat. Nothing counts, nothing flashes, and the organism plays no drums at all. It used to open at 86.6 beats a minute with a full bar of hats, kick and backbeat under it, and tapping along to that was tapping along to a number the machine had picked.

Three strikes buy a pulse. One voice on each beat, the same on every beat, quietly, and the circle in the middle starts to breathe. That is a tempo and it is deliberately not a bar: nothing in it says which beat is the one, so there is something to play with and nothing to play along to. Tapping the circle itself is the plainest way to state it.

Playing something twice buys the bar. Come back to two spots you have already struck, a lap or more later, and the organism brings its own kit in around what you played: a downbeat, a backbeat, hats between them. An ordinary four-to-the-floor or a kick and snare buys it on the second bar. This is the one thing on the page that has to be earned by repetition rather than by tidiness, and it is given back the same way: let your figure fade out of the loop and the field goes back to breathing.

The circle at the centre of the screen is the tap tempo. It is the glowing nucleus in the middle of the glass, about a third of the short side of the screen across. A strike inside it is the same note in the same place as anywhere else. Every strike anywhere counts toward the tempo; a strike in the circle counts double.

The circle is also the readout. It sits steady while the instrument has no beat, flashes on every beat once it has one, and its rim goes from a wide vague glow to a tight ring as the tracker locks onto your timing. No number for that is printed anywhere on the page.

Tap anywhere between 50 and 150 beats a minute. Tap slower than that and it hears half your tempo; faster and it hears double. Into a quiet field the third strike sets the tempo outright, and the kit takes a second or two to finish arriving at it.

Then it stays where you put it. Once you have stated a beat, an untidy hand does not move it. Playing a steady tempo loosely used to walk the beat away from you a little on nearly every strike; now it moves it on none. That is the whole of the change, and it is why the three paragraphs below say what they say: the beat is yours until you take it back, and there are exactly three ways to take it back.

One: stop, and let the field go quiet. Not a pause, a rest. A short gap starts a new phrase but keeps the beat you set; come back before your figure has faded and you are still playing at the tempo you were. Stop long enough for the figure to go, about seven bars, the same seven bars one tap takes to die on its own, and the field is at rest: the next rhythm you play sets the tempo from scratch, at its third strike, and it is also the new downbeat.

Two: strike the circle in the middle. A strike in the tap tempo region is a statement about the beat rather than a note that happens to have a time, so it un-sets the grid and the strikes that follow it set the new one. This is the way to change tempo without stopping.

Three: play something the beat cannot explain. A rhythm that stands in no simple ratio to the beat being held is taken as a new tempo outright, and it lands on the tempo you played rather than near it. The other side of the same rule: a rhythm that IS a ratio of the beat is playing along with it, however different it sounds. Three against two, half time and double time all hold the beat now, which is a fix and a cost at once. It means the common tempo relations, four against three most of all, are the ones that need the rest or the circle rather than sheer insistence.

A player who speeds up or slows down gradually is carried along, but in steps rather than smoothly, and lands within about eight percent of where they went rather than on it. A gradual accelerando is exactly the gesture that cannot be told from an untidy hand drifting, and this instrument now resolves that in favour of holding still.

The two halves are two hands, not two channels, and the instrument keeps them apart. Play a melody over a beat you already laid down and it will not drag the tempo off. Landing your melody on the beats your drums are on also keeps those drums alive: a spot on the other hand that you keep hitting with fades much more slowly than one you play around.

Kick, snare and toms are read as the heavy beats and hats alone as subdivision, which is how the bar line gets found. Playing kick and snare on the beat with hats between them is the fastest way to make the instrument find your meter. The note half sends no accent information at all, so playing only notes gives the tracker much less to work with.

What loops, and what fades

The bar. Sixteen slots, one bar for notes and one for percussion. Every strike claims the slot it landed nearest and keeps it. A strike holds at full strength for two bars and then loses about half of what is left every bar after that: one tap is gone in about seven bars. Playing the same spot again puts it back to full and buys the two bars again. Playing in time roughly doubles that: once the tempo tracker has locked onto your figure, it fades about half as fast. There is no way to lock or freeze a figure. Playing it again and playing in time are the only two things that keep it.

A slot has to be earned before it replays. Claiming it is not enough. The instrument compares each lap of your playing against the one before, per hand, and the slots that came back on a hand that is genuinely repeating are the ones it carries: they replay every bar, the organism starts answering them, and a colony grows where they were struck. A hand playing something new every bar scores too low to carry anything, so the two halves can be doing different things at once — a figure held on one, a solo on the other — and only the held one comes back.

An unearned slot is drawn on the glass at about a third of the strength of an earned one. That is the readout for all of this: full marks are notes that are coming round, faint marks are places that would be if you played them again.

What a phrase played once still does. It leans the organism's drums toward its own rhythm, for about two bars, and then they let go. So a fill or a run on the note half is not swallowed into the loop and is not thrown away either: while you have a figure going, the kit tilts onto the sixteenths you just played and drifts back. Measured over six organisms, the share of the organism's own drum hits landing on a five-note fill's slots goes from 3% before it to 14% in the two bars after and 7% four bars later.

A struck spot. Strike the same place on the glass twice and that place starts sounding by itself at the rate of your two strikes. Struck once, it never repeats. Play a short pattern there, up to five hits, at least twice through, and it copies your uneven timing as well as your rate. Play evenly over it for about thirty strikes and it flattens back to a steady pulse. Two strikes closer than a twentieth of a second, or further apart than four seconds, are not counted as a rhythm at all. A repeating spot stops when the shape under it leaves the picture, and its rhythm is remembered for twenty seconds and handed to the next new place you strike.

It does not come back at the note you played. A spot answers at the height turned over about the middle of the keyboard: strike low and it answers high, strike high and it answers low. The height it picks is a fifth to a ninth away, and then both ends are snapped to the chord, which can widen it; what you hear is a minor third away at the closest, an octave and a fifth at the widest, and about an octave most of the time. It also sits off your beat rather than on it, half of its own cycle later, in the gap. That is the difference between an answer and an echo, and it is why what comes back is in your figure without being your figure.

Not every spot answers with a note. What a place sings with is decided by the shape the field made there, and a single place struck a few times and left usually comes back on toms or on the sparkle voice rather than pitched. That is not a fault and there is no setting for it: a different shape at that spot is a different voice.

What lies dormant, and what comes back. A spot does not answer forever and it does not die either. Each one rides its own slow circle of about three minutes, and it speaks on the near half and lies quiet on the far half, so at any moment roughly half the places you have played are silent. A place is never dark longer than about a minute and a half. It returns first at a whisper and swells over the following half minute as its circle comes round, and its rate and its uneven timing come back exactly as you taught them: nothing was forgotten, it was only quiet.

This is now true of a single struck place as well, which it was not before. One place struck four times and then left goes dark for a minute and a half at a stretch and comes back at the same rate. It used to be exempt: with only one place going, it was always the place you had driven hardest, so it never lay dormant and it never came back either, because it had never gone.

What is still exempt is where your hand is. A place you are working stays awake, whether you are striking it or building around it, and for six seconds after you move on. So the instrument cannot fall silent under a player, and with nobody playing there is no player to protect.

A return from a place you left is quiet. It is the place remembering rather than answering: at its loudest it is about an eighth as loud as your own hand on the glass, and it takes the sound of the field having gone thin there.

The circles are staggered, so mostly one place returns at a time. Once or twice in a long sitting several come round together, and that is the loud version: they land in the same stretch, the field fills under all of them, and every one of them gets louder and longer for as long as they stay in line. There is no setting that changes any of this.

Adding places does not take notes off the places you already had. Every spot is given its own allowance, so a fifth voice added to four running ones is heard in full and the four are untouched. What does change is the balance: several voices sounding together share the level between them the way a room full of players does, so eight places are fuller than one and not eight times as loud, and the organism's own drums step back as you build.

Sounds you did not play. Once the instrument has hold of your beat, the organism answers: it takes a strong step of your figure and puts it back a sixteenth over or half a bar away, a step or two off in pitch or nudged into the neighbouring drum, standing at the same place on the screen as the strike it copied. That is why it can look like it appeared under your finger. An answer always sits under your own playing in volume, and ignoring it is enough: an answer you do not play along with is gone inside a few bars, and one you land on exactly is kept. Striking within about a fifth of the screen of a spot that already has a voice is the other source: the new place joins the rhythm already going.

The organism's own melodic line sits in the middle of the same five octaves you play by, wherever the organism's key happens to be, rather than a fixed two to four octaves above its root. It used to run high enough that its top notes were pinned against the ceiling of the keyboard, which came back as the same bright ping over and over with the shape of the phrase flattened out of it. A phrase that will not fit is now moved down a whole octave, which leaves its intervals alone, instead of having its top cut off. It is a lower and closer voice than it was, sitting inside the pad rather than above it.

The sparkle voice a spot pings with was doing the same thing for a different reason: it was being transposed two octaves above the note it had already been given, so every ping from a struck place landed at the top of the keyboard whatever height you struck at. It now sounds where it was chosen, which is inside the range your hand can reach.

Above the bar, the long form is breeding, and it no longer counts bars. Every eleven seconds the instrument scores six slightly different versions of the organism against what you have been playing and keeps the winner. With no playing to score against, the six versions all score the same, so the winner is whichever one mutated that round.

The winner is not taken on the moment it wins. The kit changes over about every three minutes, the key is redrawn on the same turn, and a chord holds for something between eight seconds and a minute and a quarter, half a minute on average. None of those three is counted out in bars, and none of them lands on a bar line: they are marks on a circle the instrument has been going round since it started, which is why the same piece never arrives at the same place twice. The harmony used to move roughly every seven seconds; it is four times slower than that now.

The controls

The top left strip is the whole control panel. On a narrow phone it wraps onto more than one line rather than running off the edge. Every button also has a tooltip that spells out its key, and those tooltips need a hovering mouse, so on a phone there is no way to open any of them.

play / stop space S

Starts the instrument, and stops everything when pressed again. The word changes between play and stop and the button lights mint while running.

empty what you played backspace

Hold the play button down for about half a second. A bar of colour climbs the button while you hold and it empties when the bar reaches the top. Backspace does the same instantly. There is no separate clear button.

‹ › previous / next organism ← →

Steps through the row, wrapping round, skipping anything that will not run in your browser. Your loop is not cleared. The new organism plays it from wherever the bar had reached.

chimera C

While it is lit, your strikes graft other bred organisms into the picture at the place you hit. Whatever has been pulled in is named in mint under the controls. It changes the picture only and adds nothing to the sound.

listen L

Opens the listening panel and asks for your microphone, so a microphone, a line input or a MIDI kit can play the organism instead of your finger.

keep K

Pins the organism you are on so the next visit can open on it. On a phone this has no button of its own: press ? and it appears as a chip reading keep · off. It saves the creature, not the sound you bred out of it, and the instrument says so: pinned · here next visit, the drift is not.

click M

An audible beat to play along to, off by default. It ticks every quarter note with a higher tick on the bar line, and it follows the tempo the instrument has arrived at with you rather than imposing one. It only sounds while the instrument is running, and there is no count-in. On a phone, press ? and tap the chip reading click · off.

grid Q

Pulls your drum hits onto the beat, off by default. It snaps drums only, never notes. Straightening a hit that arrived late means moving it earlier, and no instrument can play a sound before you hit it, so the grid delays every drum by one sixteenth note, a quarter of a beat, while it is on. That delay is the whole cost, and it is why the grid is not on to begin with. On a phone it is a chip behind ?.

fullscreen F

The square in the top right corner, a 44 pixel target on touch. Its picture flips from outward corners to inward ones once you are fullscreen. Some browsers, iPhone Safari among them, will not put a page fullscreen at all, and there the button is not shown.

? ? / H

Brings back the opening legend: a heading and two lines saying that there are two layers and which is which. On a narrow screen it also reveals a link to this page, and on a phone or tablet the keep, click and grid chips. None of those take a tap until you have pressed ? yourself: on a first visit, with the legend up on its own, a tap there plays a drum, because that part of the screen is still the instrument and the chips sit over the kick.

genome G and record R

Both do nothing on the website and are drawn at half strength to show it. Genome answers the genome panel is in the standalone build and record answers recording is in the standalone build. Nothing on the website saves audio to a file.

Keys do not fire while a text box, a slider or a dropdown has focus, and Escape is the only one that still works there. That includes the listening panel's own sliders and input list, so a key pressed just after touching one may do nothing until you click back onto the picture. After you have clicked a control, space presses that control again instead of starting or stopping. S always works as play and stop.

The lines under the buttons

The line that never dims reads the key, the mode, a tempo and a description of the sound, like C3 minor pentatonic · 96 bpm · struck horn, dark and warm, in a soft room · full pulse over a wash. The first part is the note the organism is centred on with its octave, and the mode is one of seven. The number is the organism's own resting tempo, not the tempo you are playing at; the tempo the instrument is following you at is never printed, and the pulsing centre circle is its whole readout. The resting tempo does migrate toward yours, slowly and by breeding, because a version whose tempo is within about 30 bpm of your beat scores better, with half and double time counting as agreement.

Under it is the message line. It prints what a chip just did and why a locked button is locked, and turns orange when the message is a warning.

The line below that names the phylum, the class and the generation, like porifera · calcarea · gen 14. Beside it, a small mint bar shows how far this organism has drifted from the one the lab bred: empty means unchanged, full means it has moved a long way. It is not a level meter and carries no number.

Before anything has loaded, the name at the end of the row reads waking…. If nothing can be fetched it reads no organisms reachable, and if none of them run in your browser, nothing here will compile in this browser. On a machine whose graphics cannot run the field, the chimera, listen, genome and record buttons are removed from the row rather than disabled, so four buttons instead of eight is that machine and not a fault.

Listening: microphone and MIDI

Press listen. The panel opens first and the browser's own microphone prompt appears at that moment. A sound coming in does exactly what a tap does: it plays a note or a drum, it is written into the bar, and kick and snare hits count toward the tempo. If the microphone is refused, the button unlights and the panel stays open with the reason written in it.

Glia asks the browser to turn off echo cancellation, noise reduction and automatic gain, because all three are built for speech and destroy what a drum detector is listening for. Some browsers keep them anyway and do not always say so.

Pointing it at the same phone's own speaker usually cannot work. Phone browsers commonly cancel the device's own output out of its own microphone. The panel says so itself, either that the browser is processing the microphone and will cancel this device's speaker, or, after three seconds of nothing arriving, no sound is reaching this input. Play the sound from something else, or use headphones. Leaving the browser to start music in another app also ends the microphone, because the operating system stops the input when the tab goes to the background; coming back, the page says listening stopped while the page was away — tap listen to open the microphone again.

The soundcheck, in order

1. Press listen and allow the microphone.
2. Pick your input from the list. It starts as default input, and real device names only appear after you have allowed the microphone once, so it is worth opening again.
3. Play a few hits and watch the meters: five bars per input. They are scaled to the loudest thing that input has heard, so bars moving does not prove sound is arriving. Grey is the sign that nothing is; red is clipping.
4. Set sense, which is how far above the room a sound has to rise before it counts. It runs from 5 to 90 and starts at 34, and it has no number beside it. Higher is pickier, not more sensitive: drag right and only your strongest hits get through, drag left and quieter hits and more of the room get through.
5. Set slack, the fixed delay added to everything heard, adjustable from 0 to 60 thousandths of a second and reading out beside the slider. It starts at 12. It buys the instrument enough room to place a heard hit accurately. Raise it if the last line's late count keeps climbing; lower it if the instrument feels behind your hands.
6. Leave the button on speakers if the sound is in the room, or press it to headphones if you are wearing them. On speakers, the detector stops listening for 35 to 75 thousandths of a second across each drum the instrument plays itself, so its own output is not heard as a hit. The same gap applies to you: a hit of yours landing on top of the instrument's kick can be missed.

The last line of the panel is the plain status: the total delay broken into its parts, like 48 ms · 6 detect + 12 slack + 30 out, plus the input name and channel count and any connected MIDI devices. When listening fails, that same line says why in words, including that the browser refused the microphone, that a call or another app has it, or that the audio clock is suspended and you should press play and then listen again.

From a microphone, a hit is sorted into kick, snare, tom or tick by the balance of low, middle and high in it. A sung or played pitch only becomes a note if it is clearly a pitch, roughly between 70 Hz and 1400 Hz, so a growl produces nothing on the note half. No more than sixteen heard hits a second get through, and after any hit that input ignores itself for four hundredths of a second, so a ringing cymbal cannot flood the organism. You never hear your own microphone through Glia: the listening path is connected to a silent output.

MIDI is the cleanest way in, with no detection and no bleed. The midi button lives inside the same panel, so you reach it by pressing listen first, but it does not open the microphone. On channel 10, notes 35 and 36 are the kick, 37 to 40 the snare, 41 to 50 the toms, and anything else the tick. Every other channel plays the note half, snapped to the organism's key and chord like everything else, so a MIDI keyboard cannot sound a wrong note and cannot sound a chromatic one either. Velocity carries through as how hard the note is struck. Note-off, sustain, pitch bend, knobs and pedals are ignored: every message that plays anything is a one-shot strike. There is no MIDI clock. If MIDI is unavailable the line says the browser has no Web MIDI, that MIDI was refused, or that no device is connected.

Role menus for assigning each input to drums or pitch appear only on an interface with three or more inputs. A normal phone or laptop microphone never shows them and is listened to for both.

The organism

What you play is the only thing selecting. Every eleven seconds, six slightly different versions of the organism are scored against your actual playing: whether their own drum pattern lands on the steps you hit, whether their tempo is near the one you are tapping, how full a bar of melody you play, and how much of a break your bar is asking for. Two new versions are bred from the best two. There is no server in this and nothing else voting.

The winner is not taken on at a bar line and it is not taken on when it wins. It is taken on about every three minutes, halfway between one key change and the next, so the two largest changes in the instrument do not land together. Sixteen rounds of breeding pass between one kit and the next, so what arrives is a bigger step than it used to be.

Your playing goes on breeding the organism after you stop. The figure is held with a half-life of about five rounds, roughly fifty-five seconds, and is gone entirely after around nine minutes of silence. That is the same length of time whether you were playing fast or slow: a round is eleven seconds and no longer a number of bars.

The mint drift bar is the readout of that: distance from the organism the lab bred, across both the texture of the sound and the direct dials. The name at the end of the control row is the species; the grey line below is where it was bred, not what you have done to it.

Chimera is a picture control. With it lit, your own strikes plant a second bred body at the spot you hit and it spreads from there. Notes the organism plays by itself only feed bodies already on screen. Striking near one that already exists feeds it and pulls its centre toward your finger instead of starting a third, so tapping around one place grows one organism rather than collecting several. At most three are on screen at once, fewer on a slow machine or with reduced motion, and each is picked to look as unlike what is already there as possible. An untouched graft fades by half in about twelve seconds. Turning chimera off retires the grafts over about a second rather than snapping them away.

A sound you like cannot be brought back. The evolved genome is written down. The instrument keeps a record of every scored generation in your browser. But nothing on the website can put one back, and there is no route in the code to do it. Keep pins the organism, and the instrument states the limit on the control itself: pinned · here next visit, the drift is not. You do not have to pin to return to an organism you liked, either: the last one you were on is stored on every step and is what the next visit opens on. The pin decides the opening organism when that stored one is no longer in the population, and the page keeps at most 24 of them.

Everything the page remembers lives in your own browser and goes nowhere else: which organism you were on, your pins, whether chimera was on, your microphone settings, and a record of the generations the instrument has scored while you played. A private window keeps none of it and the instrument plays the same.

Starting over

There is no reset button and no undo. Nothing reverses a single strike. What exists is four different sizes of stop.

Wait. One tap is gone in about seven bars on its own. Striking a different spot in the same slot takes the slot over.

Empty what you played. Hold the play button about half a second, or press backspace. This clears the sixteen-step bar, every repeating spot, the organism's answer, the rhythms the picture learned and the field itself, and it takes any grafts with it. The organism keeps playing. It does not make anything quieter. The organism plays less while your bar is full, so emptying the bar makes it play more. It also does not undo the breeding. The drift bar stays where it was.

Stop. Press play while it reads stop, or press space or S. Everything goes silent and the clock suspends. Pressing it again picks up from where it was, with the same bred version in place. Striking the glass on a stopped instrument also starts it again.

Start the breeding over. Step to another organism and back with the arrows. A fresh body is built with a fresh population, the drift bar goes back to empty, and you get the organism as the lab bred it. Re-selecting the organism already playing does nothing, so you have to leave and come back. Reloading the page is the only full restart.

Where else to go

/rorschach is the lab that bred these. Two machine-bred shaders at a time, and you pick the one you like.

/glia/legacy is a frozen copy of Glia as it stood before the rebuild, kept playable at a stable address.

/glia/lite is a separate, lighter browser synth with a hexagonal sequencer. It is not a simplified version of the instrument.