the rooms by season and by hour
Under every scene in Sweet Street lies a bed of sound with no tune in it: a spring dawn of blackbird, robin and wren; an autumn afternoon of rooks and jackdaws and sheep three fields away; a winter night of bare twigs, a tawny owl and his mate, and a dog two streets off. There are fourteen, one for each room, season and hour the game asks for, and each is a ninety-second seamless loop built from the same synthesised voices as the Menagerie, placed at a distance. Here they are with the cast that sang in the window and what the bake measured of them.
Two benches sit under this board, where a sound is made while you wait: the sound builder makes one ambience sound from the engine's own knobs, and the mixer sets a whole garden's layers against an hour, a season and the weather.
Nothing on this page was gathered with a microphone: a bed is composed, voice by voice, at the distance the ear would have it. Below, the second board — where the layers of one garden may be set by hand against a chosen hour, season and weather, and heard.
one garden's layers, set against a chosen hour
The beds above are baked: the game ships them whole. This board is the other half of the same catalogue. Set the garden below — where you are standing, the hour, the weather, the season, and a few facts about what has been planted and who has settled — and every layer says at once what the Listening Bench would say of it: playing now, asleep till dawn, not while it rains, nothing here makes that sound. Raise the ones you want, place a voice near or over the wall, and tap the seal. Only then is anything rendered, and it is rendered on our server, from the same recipes the game bakes.
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A mix is at most twenty seconds, at most ten layers, and the room refuses one that would take it longer to make than it is to hear — it will say so in a sentence. Two layers are listed but cannot yet sound here: the rain and the pond's margin have no recipe in the catalogue, and the gramophone is the music room's to furnish.