the ear

one egg. it is alive only while someone is breathing into it.

a single shared egg, living on the open internet. it has no power of its own. it stays awake only on the breath of whoever is with it right now — anywhere in the world, all at once. stop, and it cools. leave it alone long enough and it dies. the next breath wakes it, colder, carrying a scar.

how the sound is made

three things move the egg. only one of them is you.

the breath — you. your microphone never leaves your phone. only a single number — how hard you are breathing — travels up to the egg. that number is the one thing that warms it, pulls its chord into true tuning, and holds off its death. and your own breath returns to you, softened into grain, almost words, only ever in your own ear.

the well — this room's flicker. underneath the sound runs a fine, unrepeatable flicker made right here: a cryptographic seed from your own device, the small irregularities of its timing, and — when you allow the microphone — the faint hiss of the room you are in. it is never sent anywhere. it is not stored. it is not a message, and it is not a number from a far-off lab. it is the one thing in the egg that cannot be guessed, and it is what keeps the flame from ever repeating.

the weather — the patterned cosmos. the egg also feels the large, slow forces moving through the world right now: the sun (the solar wind, its magnetic storms, its flares), the earth (every earthquake on the planet sends a tremor down through it), the moon (its phase, brightening the egg toward full), the sea (the tide rising and falling on the california coast), the quantum vacuum (a fine, ceaseless restlessness, threaded in from a public source), and the 7.83 hz pulse of the earth's own resonance — the schumann hum — beating quietly underneath. these stir the egg. they cannot feed it.

the one law

breath feeds. the well flickers. the world stirs. witness opens the ear. silence judges. the world can move the egg, brighten it, trouble it — but it cannot keep it alive; that is left, entirely, to a person who chooses to breathe. and when no one breathes, the silence does not rest. it sharpens — and the marks of everyone who came before grow louder.

and you may only watch. to watch is not to feed — a listener changes nothing the egg can live on, and watching can never hold off its death. but the room knows the dark has an eye in it: the near things come a little forward, the chord leans toward you, and now and then the song makes a small space, as if listening back.

reading the flame

there is nothing to read but the fire. tall and steady, it is warm; low and guttering, it is cooling; gone, with a thread of smoke, it has died and the song has left. a small leap as you breathe is the egg answering you — the one flame that grows under a breath instead of being put out by it.

the well — local, on your device: its own randomness, its timing, the room's hiss · the world — noaa space weather prediction center · usgs · noaa tides & currents · the quantum vacuum (anu quantum numbers) · the schumann resonance, 7.83 hz

not art. not music. an instrument — for the meeting of a person and everything that is not a person.
breathe.