ERG is a fictional institute studying booming dunes — the sand seas that resonate near 80 Hz when their slip faces avalanche. The page carries live blowing sand, and clicking it fires an actual sub-bass boom through the Web Audio API while the grains leap away from the wavefront.
The singing-dunes phenomenon is real, strange, and almost unknown — perfect museum material. The design stages a dusk field recording session: plum-to-amber sky, dune silhouettes with lit crests, and a physical hint that begs to be clicked. The boom is the site's handshake: visual, audible, and slightly felt if your speakers cooperate.
Syne Extrabold — display: wide, slightly alien, like ripple patterns seen from a plane. Lexend Light reads the field notes.
| Element | How it works |
|---|---|
| Saltation grains | 2,400 particles ride a gusting wind (per-grain sine phase), get spring-pulled toward the nearest dune surface, and take random hops — the actual physics of saltation, the way sand really travels. |
| Dune surfaces | Two layered profile functions (stacked sines) drawn as filled silhouettes with lit crest strokes; the same functions serve as the particles' resting height, so the sand and the ground can never disagree. |
| The boom | Click spawns an expanding ring; grains within the wavefront take an outward-and-up impulse. Simultaneously an OscillatorNode glides 84→62 Hz through a lowpass with a 1.9-second decay — a field recording's worth of infrasound-adjacent rumble, gated behind the click gesture as autoplay policy requires. |
| Dusk sky | A four-stop vertical gradient repainted per frame under everything — the ten minutes after sunset, held indefinitely. |
| Accessibility | Reduced motion drops the grains and rings; dunes and sky render still. All data (78 Hz, 0.15 mm, Kelso, Wahiba) is real and in text. |
| You do | The page does |
|---|---|
| Click the sand | A ring races outward, grains leap from it, and your speakers produce a dune's low note |
| Wait | The wind keeps carrying sand across both dunes in gusts |