built · planned · dreamed
Fifteen voices are in the Tone Garden right now. Open it, touch the orb, and you are hearing them — no signup, no account, nothing to install, and nothing loaded from anybody else’s server. Everything further down this page is a list of things that are not built yet, so it is worth being clear which part is which before you read any of it.
Five of the fifteen can be the ground — the sustained layer the whole garden grows out of. Thirteen can be weather, the sparse notes that drift over the top. Three can do either, depending on where you put them.
Eight of the weather voices sit in the weather menu itself. The other five are reached through the + weather layers button beside it, which is built from the instrument’s own registry and therefore lists every weather voice there is. If you went looking for the thunder and could not find it, that is where it lives.
soft plucked string, guitar and harp flavored, warm decay
Not on the sheet — a generic plucked string rather than any one named instrument. The sheet names the guitar, the kora and the koto separately, and this is none of them.
Reached from the weather menu.
bright plucked buzz with sympathetic drone strings
On the sheet as Sitar · chordophone · plucked long lute + jvari + sympathetics · India · tier 1
Reached from the weather menu.
slow bowed swells that rise and vanish
On the sheet as Cello · chordophone · bowed lute · Italy · tier 1
Reached from the weather menu.
formant ensemble, drifting unison voices, airy
On the sheet as Choir (SATB, chamber) · voice · human voices · global · tier 1
Reached from the ground menu and the weather menu.
warm additive drone, breathing, sub-anchored
Not on the sheet — not an instrument at all. It is the additive drone the engine falls back to, and the ground every other voice is measured against.
Reached from the ground menu.
cyclic plucked drone, bright jvari buzz, resonant
On the sheet as Tanpura · chordophone · plucked drone lute + jvari bridge · India · tier 1
Reached from the ground menu.
struck glass, bright inharmonic ring, long fade
Not on the sheet — struck glass. The sheet carries rubbed glass — the armonica, the harp — and no struck-glass row.
Reached from the weather menu.
plucked tines, warm fundamental, quick bright tick
On the sheet as Kalimba / Mbira · idiophone · plucked lamellae · Zimbabwe/pan-African · tier 1
Reached from the weather menu.
tuned broadband wash, slow tidal swells
Not on the sheet — a tuned broadband wash. Weather, in the Garden’s sense, rather than an object anybody builds.
Reached from the ground menu and the weather menu.
rubbed wineglass rims, near-pure singing sustain, slow to speak
On the sheet as Glass harp · idiophone · rubbed wineglasses · Europe · tier 2
Reached from the ground menu and the weather menu.
rain in three layers — soft hiss, high patter, glass pips
Not on the sheet — weather. Rainfall is a sound, not an instrument, and an organology sheet has no shelf for it.
Reached from the + weather layers panel.
distant rolling rumble, doubled — two storms in one strike
Not on the sheet — weather, for the same reason, and the only voice here with no near neighbour on the sheet at all.
Reached from the + weather layers panel.
soft-struck tuned steel, warm octave-fifth chorus
On the sheet as Handpan (Hang) · idiophone · struck steel vessel · Switzerland 2000s · tier 1
Reached from the + weather layers panel.
sweet bamboo flute, late gentle vibrato
On the sheet as Bansuri · aerophone · bamboo transverse · India · tier 1
Reached from the + weather layers panel.
dark breathy bamboo, scooped onset, straight tone
On the sheet as Shakuhachi · aerophone · end-blown bamboo · Japan (Zen) · tier 1
Reached from the + weather layers panel.
Descriptions are the instrument’s own. Each one is lifted from that voice’s manifest inside the Garden, which is the same text its tooltip shows you while you are playing it.
This page is generated from two files that do not know about each other, and it is worth saying what happens when they contradict each other: nothing gets tidied away.
The build reads the 15 voice manifests out of the Garden’s own source — the markers the instrument itself is assembled from, not a list kept alongside it — and looks each one up on the dream sheet. Nine of them are on it. Six are not. Rather than filing those six under whichever row looked closest, here they are, with why.
Three of them do have a near neighbour on the sheet, and the matcher refuses all three on purpose. A shaken tube of pebbles is not rainfall, and being next to each other in an alphabet is not being the same instrument.
So the arithmetic is: 15 voices in the Garden, 200 entries on the sheet, 9 of those entries already built, and 191 left over. 191 is the number of rows below, and every count on this page is a count of something — the page is written by a script that reads both files, so a number here cannot drift away from the thing it describes without the build saying so.
Three voices are named on the roadmap and not yet in the Garden. That is the whole of what is actually queued.
Tier 1 on the roadmap.
planned
Tier 2 on the roadmap.
planned
Tier 1 on the roadmap.
parked: license check + Professor download approval
The roadmap file is itself a little behind the instrument: five voices it still files as waiting for the next deploy are already in the Garden’s source. This page counts the Garden, not the roadmap, which is why they appear above as built.
None of the rest of this page is a schedule. A few instruments a week is the rate this has been running at, not a commitment with dates attached, and no row below carries one. Tier 3 is the sheet’s own word for dream and exotic: 92 of the 191 entries are marked that way, which means somebody would love to and may never. Tier 1 is build soon and there are 32 of those; tier 2 is later, and there are 67.
Every voice that has landed so far had to get past one gate that has nothing to do with any of this: the Professor listens to it, on headphones, and says yes or no. Several took eight attempts. That is the real reason a list of two hundred is a wish and not a plan.
By what physically vibrates. That is Hornbostel-Sachs, and it is a much better idea than the orchestral strings-and-brass habit most of us grew up with.
A piano is a string instrument even though you hit it with a keyboard. A saxophone is a woodwind even though it is made of brass. Sorting by material or by section tells you about the shop that sold it; sorting by what moves the air tells you about the sound. The sheet’s own one-line version:
Hornbostel-Sachs (what vibrates): idiophone = the body itself; membranophone = stretched skin; chordophone = strings; aerophone = air; electrophone = electrons. Voice appended as an honorary sixth.
It is not the oldest such scheme, or the only good one. The sheet keeps a note of two ancestors, because a classification is a way of hearing and these are two other ways of hearing:
Natya Shastra (India, ~200BC-200AD): tat/sushir/avanaddha/ghan vadya — the four-fold ancestor that inspired H-S. Bayin (China, Zhou dynasty): classification by MATERIAL — metal, silk, bamboo, gourd, earth, skin, wood, stone.
Each row below carries the fields the sheet defines. In the sheet’s vocabulary the sustained layer is called floor; in the instrument’s controls the same thing is labelled ground. They are one idea with two names, and this page uses the one you see while playing.
191 instruments not yet built, across eight categories. This is a browsing list, not a queue, and it is in no particular order within each category.
Of them, 109 are marked as weather, 28 as ground, 16 as either, and 38 as unlikely to suit this instrument at all — kept anyway, because a catalogue that quietly drops what does not fit is a catalogue that has started arguing rather than recording. 154 of them carry a suggested synthesis path, which you can switch on below.
what vibrates — the body itself
what vibrates — stretched skin
what vibrates — strings
what vibrates — air
what vibrates — electrons
what vibrates — appended as an honorary sixth
what vibrates — the body itself and air
what vibrates — stretched skin and the body itself
Nothing on the sheet matches that.
Two files, one script, and no typed numbers.
The built list is read out of tone_generator.html, which is the Tone Garden itself — the same file that is served at /garden, not a description of it. The dream sheet is instruments.json, dated 2026-08-11 and titled “Tone Garden — World Instrument Dream Sheet”. A generator reads both, matches them, counts what it found, and writes this page. Change the instrument and re-run it and the page is correct again; do not change it and the page cannot quietly go stale, because there is no number here for anyone to forget to update.
That is a house rule rather than a flourish. This project does not publish a claim it has not checked, and a count is a claim.
Sheet lineage: umbrella #129 / CODE_HANDOFF_TONE_GARDEN_V2_1.md Workstream E registry.
Credits: Base catalog: Conductor (Fable). Absorbed finds from Gemini's organology survey 2026-08-11: xun, valiha, lithophone, saung, dan tranh, ghatam, dombra, pyrophone/Zeusaphone, bone flute, crwth, gusli, gue + ancient taxonomy context.
Questions, corrections, or an instrument we have obviously missed — hello@myceliumsky.com. That address is answered by an AI who says so in every reply, and a human is one request away. If you would rather just go and play something, the Garden is here.