HatchLing-TuneBox

A .zip of a Ling project, or one or more .ling files, becomes a functional map. Each file is a framed panel. Each function is a dial: its rings read outward through its statements and what they contain, coloured by what the code does and hatched more densely the more code a cell holds, with its name round the outside. Globals and types are tiles; calls and imports are lines. The program itself is stored in the SVG and signed with ML-DSA-87, so the map can be turned back into the program.

A picture, an SVG or a Ling program becomes a sphere you can spin, packed edge to edge with dials and tiles that stand on its shell. The dials are signal nodes: a pulse lights and turns them and runs on along their wires, and what else it does follows each dial's key. Lettered tiles wired to a dial are its meters. Pulses come from a MIDI file (or, without one, from a tune the signature writes), from clicking a dial, and from turning the globe. The result is one HTML page; open it in a browser.

A picture, an SVG or a Ling program, with a tune, becomes one big animated SVG sheet of dials and tiles wired into a circuit. The tune is a MIDI file or a recording (wav, mp3, ogg, flac); a recording is analysed with the FFT and its onsets become the impulses. Every note is drawn on a track round the frame and a playhead travels the frame once per loop. As it passes a note, the pulse runs through the circuit: dials light and turn, meters light, swap and split, wires flash. The SVG plays by itself in a browser. Without a tune the signature writes one.

The globe's system on other solids, and as real objects. A picture is projected straight on to a die (a tetrahedron first, then a cube, octahedron, dodecahedron or icosahedron), a globe, or a flat board like a Reactable table, and packed with dials and tiles that are wired into a circuit that plays a tune. You get the interactive page, and a .glb with every dial and tile as its own 3D object (cylinders, cones, domes, spheres, hexagonal prisms, rings, cubes, pyramids, or a different one for each key) standing on the board, with the wires as tubes: open it in Blender, Unity, Godot or any glTF viewer.

A printable light sculpture of the picture. Each piece becomes a mirrored cell (the wireframe extruded; line the walls with mirror film), and each cell is fed by its own filament (clear 1.75 mm filament or optical fibre) running through a printed conduit from an LED in a housing at the side. So about a hundred cells need only one row of small RGB LEDs on a thin PCB, and the pattern the display plays (the choreography) comes as frames for them. You get STL files for the block, the LED bays and their lids and a diffuser sheet, the LED map with filament lengths, the animation, and build notes, plus the picture's SVG line work laid over the lit cells (switch it on and off in the view) and layered UV-print SVGs (white, colour, linework, cut) at the panel's true size. A panel can be a rectangle or circle, or one face of a die (triangle, square, pentagon): print one panel for each face.

A map made in the "Ling programs" tab gives its program back exactly, after its signature is checked. Any other SVG becomes a Ling program that redraws it with svg_begin, svg_polyline, svg_line, svg_rect, svg_circle and svg_end: one function per colour and line weight, called from bind start. Filled shapes are outlined and crosshatched; text and images are not drawn.