Fill Harmonics, the crossword puzzle music machine · parker higgins dot net

Today I’m releasing Fill Harmonics, a music machine that takes its rules and styling from the world of crossword puzzles. The name is a pun: in crossword lingo, “fill” is the stuff that goes into the grid. This project is a collaboration with Natan Last, one of my cruciverbal inspirations and the author of “Across The Universe,” a very fun upcoming book on the history and culture of crosswords (available for pre-order now!). See an example grid creation: We got started on Fill Harmonics towards the end of my batch at Recurse Center. From a tech perspective, it was a fun opportunity to continue building in Javascript, and combine some recent areas of interest: in particular, the CSS grid data structure work I’d done for Malaika’s personal page and the web audio libraries I’d explored for my infinite sea shanty. Similarly, this one is written entirely in vanilla Javascript, though I think at some point it exceeded the complexity where that was a good idea. Natan and I are both fans of Ma

saved by

• Elise Corbin