// Pan Sounds
Pan is the voice assistant I built on my homelab, and their face is ten nodes, the same ones as in Pan Faces. When Pan is resting, the nodes wander. Each one heads for a spot nearby, stops for a while, then sets off again. Any two that come close enough join up.
Now those moments make a sound. A node stopping plays one. Two nodes connecting play another. The slider sets how fast the nodes wander, so you can hear it thin out to the odd click or build into a busy patter.
How it works
The wandering is the same as Pan's resting face everywhere else, ported from the desk display's firmware. Each node picks a random spot within reach, walks to it, then sits still for up to five seconds before picking another. Nodes that bump into each other swap destinations. Any two closer than a set distance are joined by a dotted line.
A node arriving and sitting down plays the stop sound. A new line between two nodes plays the connect sound. Each sound is panned left or right to match where it happened, so a node stopping on the left of the screen sounds from the left.
The slider speeds up or slows down the whole wander, the walking and the sitting, from a quarter of the normal speed to four times. It's the same number of nodes either way, just more or fewer things happening every second.
Sound stays off until you turn it on, because browsers don't let a page make a noise before you've touched it.
The sounds
Stop is a short burst of white noise. Its volume envelope is almost all attack: about 40 milliseconds to rise to full volume, then it drops straight back to silence. There's no delay, hold, sustain or release to speak of.
Connect is a sine tone at C3. It starts at full volume, falls to half over 200 milliseconds, and holds there until the note ends, when it stops almost instantly.
Both sounds go through the same filter: a resonant high-pass at about 2kHz, 12dB per octave, with a small bump at the cutoff. It takes out the low end so the sounds stay clear on a small speaker that can't reproduce bass, like the ones in Pan's desk board and Tick.
To do
- Use the Answer Yes and Answer No sounds, perhaps with a face for each.
Changelog
2026-10-06
- The sounds section says what each sound is: Stop is white noise, Connect is a sine tone at C3.
- The sounds section shows the filter both sounds go through, a resonant 12dB high-pass at about 2kHz, in the EQ graph from the Audio Test post.
- New section, The sounds, with each sound's volume envelope drawn in the same envelope graph as the Audio Test post. Stop is a 40ms attack, then straight off. Connect starts at full volume and decays to half over 200ms.
- Initial release: Pan's resting face with a sound when a node stops and when two nodes connect, panned to where it happens, and a speed slider from a quarter to four times.
I'd love to tell you more. Let's work together.