neural speaks the realm · Jaimla speaks in it
← back to Δ DELTAVERSEneural is the voice of the DeltaVerse. It is the default on every page and after every refresh, and it is not edited.
A reader who has heard the realm speak once should hear the same voice next time, on every page, whatever anyone has been auditioning.
That is the whole reason the reference is fixed. Try any other voice you like — the choice lasts for as long as you are listening, and the next page you open speaks in neural again. An audition is not a preference.
Not an audio file and not a model. The browser owns the synthesis, on-device where the platform has it; nothing is downloaded and nothing leaves this page. A DeltaVerse voice is three things:
◉ neural and Jaimla are saved voices: press SAY to hear either, but neither has an edit control. The derived voices below them do.
Jaimla is the machine-learning agent of the realm, and she is the realm's female voice. She is not a narrator of the DeltaVerse; she is in it, which is why she reads as a participant rather than as an announcer. She is unhurried — taking her time, not dragging — because an agent that considers before she answers should sound like one.
Jaimla is saved in her own right, exactly as neural is, and that is a correction rather than a flourish. She used to be neural with a ratio applied: a shade slower, a shade lower. That does not make a woman. Pitch is not gender. Lowering a male voice drags its resonances down with it and produces a larger man; raising one produces a man in falsetto. What actually carries a voice's gender is which voice is chosen, so Jaimla now asks the platform for a female voice by name and holds her own settings, answering to nobody's multiplier.
Where this page is played from a recording rather than spoken live, the same holds and it was measured: Jaimla is rendered from a female model at 184 Hz against neural's 95 Hz. The old ratio-on-neural version came out at about 87 Hz — lower than the voice it was supposed to differ from.
LISTEN, beside the heading of this page, opens the voice panel and begins reading in the same gesture. It reads the document the browser is already showing, and it lights each word as it is said.
There are two ways it can do that, and the panel says which it is using. live means your own browser is speaking, on-device: nothing is downloaded and nothing leaves the page. file means this page was rendered ahead into an audio file, which is what you will hear if a recording exists in the voice you picked — it starts instantly, seeks, and can be downloaded. The player prefers the file, because someone who presses LISTEN twice wants the second press to be immediate.
When it is speaking live, the highlight follows the synthesiser's own word-boundary events rather than a timer; when it is playing a file, it follows marks measured at the moment the file was made. Either way the word that is lit is the word you are hearing, not an estimate of it.
To read something that is not this page, there is doc.player: paste any URL and hear it read, with the option to render it to a file you keep.
Open AUDIO DECK in the player and the controls appear a second time as instruments — a gain knob, a level meter, a speed control, a voice selector and a transport. It is the same machine with two faces: the knobs and the plain controls read and write the same values, so they cannot disagree, and the player works exactly as well with the deck never loaded.
The gain knob goes to 400%, and above 100% it is genuinely amplifying rather than just
un-attenuating. An <audio> element's own volume can only ever turn a sound
down — it clamps at 1.0 — so past that point a Web Audio gain stage carries the rest.
ANCIENT needs it: that voice is a whisper by design and is still the quietest thing in the cast
after loudness normalisation. The taper is squared, because loudness is not linear in the ear and
a linear knob wastes most of its travel where nothing much changes.
The instruments are DreamKnob
(dreamknob) — knobs, meters, segment displays and transports drawn as studio hardware,
which is the right shape for controls you adjust by feel rather than by number.
The JavaScript idiom here — plain modules, no framework on the page itself, one behaviour per file — follows javascriptit, and the interaction pieces (drag, drop, resize, the small reusable behaviours) follow mlodular. Both are the reference for what gets written by hand here and what gets reached for from a library.