Nachtflug -- Night Flight
English · Deutsch
A demo by Hans Schnorrenberger, written in
Drachenhauch: uplifting trance
from A minor to C major, about four and a half minutes. A journey from the
sea at night over the mountains, through a tunnel of light into space to a
galaxy -- and back home: earthrise in orbit, re-entry, above the clouds with
a skein of wild geese, past a coast with a lighthouse, until the sun rises
over the sea. Every scene has its own sounds -- sea, wind, rumble, geese,
surf, gulls, a foghorn. Music, sounds and pictures are all made by the
program itself: there is not a single sound or image file in it.
▶ Watch it in your browser: https://hasoschno70.github.io/Nachtflug/
Click once to start (browsers only play sound after a click), put on
headphones, ⛶ for full screen. The first load is about 20 MB.
The journey
| |
|---|
| |
| Ocean at night -- northern lights, moonlight on the water, shooting stars | Low flight through a valley, a river of light, snow falling |
| |
| Tunnel of light -- neon rings racing past on the beat | Star nebula -- the breakdown, a voice: "close your eyes" |
| |
| Galaxy of 2,600 light trails, a comet, the key change | Earthrise -- city lights, the glowing rim of the atmosphere, the sun rising over the edge of the Earth |
| |
| Re-entry -- plasma glowing with the kick drum | Above the clouds -- a sea of clouds, wild geese heading for the sun |
| |
| Coast -- cliffs, surf, a lighthouse turning in time | Daybreak over the sea, where it all began; a swarm of sparks writes "Drachenhauch" |
How it is made
- Music: synthesised note by note (
AUDIO_NOTE, AUDIO_SFX) and played
on an audio clock: supersaw lead, piano, a choir built from overtones and
formants, pads that pump under the kick, a trance gate, a key change in the
finale, and on the way home the harmony brightens from A minor to C major.
The voice comes from the system's speech output and is layered and echoed.
- Sounds: filtered noise and notes -- the goose call, for example, is
built like the choir: overtones weighted by nasal formants, with a fast
rasp in the voice.
- Pictures: every scene is a fragment shader (raymarching through
terrain, clouds as a volume, cliffs and a lighthouse as distance fields);
the galaxy is a real 3D scene drawn with one instanced draw call.
- Everything follows the music: what pulses, pulses with the kick drum,
what flashes, flashes with the melody, the colours follow the chords, and
the scenes change through light.
What is in this repository
The browser version: the Drachenhauch runtime dhrt compiled to WebAssembly
(dhrt.wasm, dhrt.js, dhrt.data with the shaders) and the source
program.dh, which is compiled in the browser when the page starts. To try
it locally, serve the folder with any static web server, e.g.
python -m http.server, and open the page.
The licences of the libraries contained in dhrt.wasm are listed in
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.
