Ephemera instrument

Play the gas

A real compressible-gas simulation running on your GPU, sonified by a resonator bank. Strike it and shocks, vortices, and sound bloom across the screen - and on this page, every headline is made of the same gas.

Ignite the gas →See how it works

WebGPU
Resonator bank
Shocks & vortices

How it works

Strike, simulate, sound

01
Strike the field
Click or drag on the gas. You inject momentum - a vortex kick or a continuous jet - straight into a compressible Euler solver running on your GPU.
02
Watch the physics
Shocks, vortices, and contact discontinuities form for real: HLLC fluxes, slope-limited reconstruction, RK2 in time. No fakery, no sprite sheets.
03
Hear it resonate
Probes sample the flow and drive a bank of resonators. Vorticity becomes pitch, density becomes timbre - the gas is the score.

Features

Physics you can play

Real compressible flow

A finite-volume Euler solver - HLLC Riemann fluxes, minmod reconstruction, RK2 - on a widescreen GPU grid. Shocks and vortices are emergent, not animated.

Sonified by resonators

A grid of probes reads the field and feeds a resonator bank plus a GPU-synthesised gas body. The flow's vorticity and density shape pitch, timbre, and noise.

Scenes & view modes

Blast, Kármán street, shock wedge, Kelvin - Helmholtz, steam-pipe organ - each a full preset. Render as density, schlieren, vorticity, dye, or ink.

Text written in smoke

A glyph-stamp pass paints letters as constant-pressure contacts, so titles reform crisply without a blast - the same path that makes this page's words gas.

Access

Open it in a tab

Gasman runs entirely in your browser with no account or download. Bring a WebGPU-capable browser (recent Chrome, Edge, or Safari) for the live simulation; everywhere else still gets the full page.

Price: Free
Install: None. Runs in the browser.
Needs: A WebGPU browser

Ignite the gas →

Questions

Frequently asked

It's real. Gasman runs a finite-volume compressible Euler solver on your GPU every frame: HLLC Riemann fluxes, slope-limited reconstruction, and RK2 time stepping. The shocks and vortices you see are emergent physics, not a pre-rendered loop.

Go play the gas

Strike the field, watch the shocks roll, and hear the flow sing. It's a tab away.

Ignite the gas →Explore the family