← experiments

27 October 2026 · Day 27 · Built with Claude

Watched Pot

Listening isn't looking. While you listen, the tune wanders a small step each bar. Each time you look, it either snaps back to how it was at your last look or the wandering becomes real. Look often enough and it goes nowhere.

The picture only changes when you look, and fades as it goes stale. Height is pitch, size is loudness, a brighter colour is a brighter sound, and the faint rings are the first tune.
Sound off

Chance it has moved on 0% 0 s since you last looked

Off. Only your own looks count.

Looks
0
Snapped back
0
Moved on
0
Steps from the first tune
0 of 18

Press Start, then listen for a while before you look. You can also press L to look.

Try this

  1. Start listening and leave it alone for half a minute. You'll hear it drift.
  2. Now tap Look every couple of seconds. It almost always snaps back, and the tune stops going anywhere.
  3. Leave it for twenty seconds, then look. Now it usually moves on, and the picture catches up with what you've been hearing.
  4. Switch to another tab for a minute and come back. Coming back counts as a look. Can you make it boil?

What you're hearing

Each bar, one note shifts: a step up or down in D dorian, a notch louder or softer, brighter or duller, or it drops out to a rest. Every four bars the dynamics and tone rise and fall as a phrase. Underneath, a low D and A simmer. They warm up and start to bubble as the tune strays from where it began, whether or not you've seen it.

The quantum Zeno effect

A system that would drift from one state into another can be held still by checking it often enough, because each check resets the drift. Baidyanath Misra and George Sudarshan named this after Zeno's arrow paradox in 1977. In 1990 Wayne Itano and colleagues at NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology) showed it in the lab, using laser pulses to check trapped beryllium ions again and again.

The toy uses the same rule. After t seconds unlooked, a look finds the tune has moved on with chance sin²(π/2 · t/20 s). Look n times, evenly, across twenty seconds, and the chance it never moves is cos²(π/2n)ⁿ, which climbs towards certainty as n grows.

Looks per 20 s1241020
Chance it stays put0%25%53%78%88%

A lens, not physics

A tune isn't a quantum state, and nothing about your eyes reaches the oscillators. The toy simply declares that listening doesn't count as looking and looking does. That split is the interesting part. The sound changes continuously while the picture only updates when you check, so for a while what you hear and what you see disagree. It belongs with the last two days: a measurement that changes the thing it measures.