Lloyd Stellar's Homepage - Free Audio Tools, Retro Games and Electro Music

Paper tray on the left, cutting mat on the right, strips from Shelley, Dickinson and a page of studio notes

You put up to five texts on the bench: a poem from PoetryDB (Shakespeare, Dickinson, Poe, Blake, Whitman and about a hundred more poets, with 232 poems built in for when the database is down), something you type yourself, or a TXT, PDF or DOCX file that is read inside your browser. Press Cut up and the scissors slice everything into phrases of two to five words, cut between noun groups, verb groups and prepositions, so you get "under the moonlight" and "eats a lot of pie" instead of loose words or whole sentences. Every strip is a piece of paper with the right typeface for where it came from: old book type for the poems, a typewriter for your own notes, with a sliver of the neighbouring lines showing at the cut edge.

Then you dig. Search the pile for a word, shuffle it, or deal a random line onto the mat. Drag a strip between two others and they shift aside; drop it below the last line for a new one. When the lyric is there, export it as text, as a picture of the mat, or save the whole project as JSON to pick up later. It works on a phone too, held sideways, with a fullscreen mode.

Start here: Bowie Lyrics Cutter. The page also tells the story of the technique, from Tristan Tzara's Dada recipe through Burroughs and Gysin to Bowie's Verbasizer.

2048 Override: green phosphor, a trace meter and a red Corrupted Node that will not fuse

The sliding and fusing are exactly Gabriele Cirulli's 2048 from 2014. The room you play it in is new: a military CRT with scanlines and a curved glass, a VU meter that kicks on every move, a signal ladder, a system log and an AI Trace bar. Every value is a piece of resistance hardware, from a 2 Hz sub-pulse and a blinking 4-bit packet up to an EMP cell, a neural jammer, a vacuum-tube sub-server and a quantum transmitter with a sweeping radar. Fusions spark and send out a frequency ring. Moves without a fusion raise the trace; at 100% NEXUS-9 seals a cell for five turns. From tile 32 onward red Corrupted Nodes spawn that only an equal signal or a neighbouring 64 EMP Cell can remove.

The sound is synthesized live in the browser: a whoosh per slide, a spark per fusion that climbs in pitch with the tile value, and an electro loop underneath that picks up tempo and extra parts as your highest tile grows. Make 2048 and the screen strobes, the terminal speaks through the S.A.M. speech synth, and you can push on into Global Purge mode towards 4096 and 8192. Your best tile unlocks phosphor colours for the terminal, six decrypted lore files and, at 2048, a transmission with my Corporate Electro EP.

Play it here: 2048 Override. Works with keyboard, swipes and touch buttons, with a fullscreen mode for phones. The code is based on the open-source 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli (MIT licence).

Patch Bay: a skiff full of modules, patch cables and one runaway clock

The rules are the ones Alexey Pajitnov wrote down in 1984: ten columns, twenty rows, seven shapes. Here the well is a Eurorack skiff with brushed aluminium, wooden cheeks and rails with screw holes, and the seven shapes are modules: a MULT, a quad VCA, an envelope, a VCO, a ladder filter, a clock divider and a wavefolder, each with its own panel, knob, jack and blinking LED. Every module you mount gets patched to its neighbours with a cable, so a full case turns into cable spaghetti. Your score is Total Voltage in millivolts, the speed is the master clock in BPM, there is a Buffer to park a module and a Pending Shipments queue of the next three.

The sound is effects only, so your own records can keep playing: each module type answers a landing with its own click, sweep or wobble, a drone thickens as the case fills, a voltage pulse runs through a closed row, a Master Patch of four rows triggers a strobe and a bass drop, and when the rack overflows you get a short circuit, a feedback squeal and a cloud of magic smoke. Voltage adds up across games and unlocks the Rack Customizer: black anodised, brass or neon cases, neon or braided cables, and soundbanks that route the row clears through the 808 samples of this site's drum machine, an acid 303 or West Coast FM blips. Plus three achievements for the real patchers.

Play it here: Patch Bay. The code is based on Jake Gordon's open-source JavaScript Tetris (MIT licence).