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.