The Lattice · Questions & Answers
Asked, answered.
Short answers to the questions the lattice is most often asked. Longer readings live on the about, lenses, and methodology pages.
01What is The Lattice?
The Lattice is a free, browser-based interactive visualization of human contact. It renders more than 1,600 handshakes — from 2000 BCE to 2200 CE — through seven lenses, set to 86 original tracks tuned to 432 Hz. It was made by one person, wxza, as a single HTML file.
02What is a "handshake" in The Lattice?
The smallest unit the lattice recognizes: two parties, a year, one of eight domains, and a weight from 0 to 1. The domains are greeting, alliance, intimacy, exchange, creation, machine, farewell, and crossing. A TCP exchange between two computers counts; so does a farewell at a harbor in 1620.
03Are the handshakes real historical events?
Some are. 29 anchored handshakes are hand-authored, named events from the historical record. 1,600 are procedurally woven texture — stand-ins for the ordinary contact history never wrote down. 14 are near-misses: contact that plausibly should have happened and did not, drawn as grey ghosts, never as fact. The full weave is documented in the methodology.
04What are the seven lenses?
Sphere (a globe where latitude is time), Chord (ribbons between the eight domains), River (centuries as a stream), Rhyme (matching patterns across eras), Song (an audio-reactive body), Undefined (phantom handshakes that never happened), and Index (a flat, searchable list of every record). Each is described on the lenses page.
05What time span does The Lattice cover?
From 2000 BCE to 2200 CE — about 4,200 years. The equator of the sphere is the present, the year 2026. The past is compressed by a power curve, the way memory compresses it; the future appears as a cool probabilistic shimmer because it has not happened.
06Is The Lattice free?
Yes. Free to visit and use — no account, no subscription, no ads, no paywall.
07Why is the music tuned to 432 Hz?
Every track plays at a rate of 432/440, lowering concert pitch A440 to A432. It is an aesthetic choice: the library sits slightly darker and warmer than standard tuning, which suits a near-black room. No health claims are attached to it.
08Does The Lattice work offline?
Yes. It is a progressive web app: a service worker caches the shell on first visit, and each melody is cached after its first play. Install it from the browser and return to it without a connection.
09Does The Lattice track me?
No. No analytics, no ads, no cookies set by the site, no accounts. Preferences and anything you add stay in your browser's local storage. The specifics are enumerated on the privacy page.
10Can I add my own handshake?
Yes. The add-yours form places your handshake on the sphere as an ember pulse. Up to 20 are kept, in your browser only — never uploaded, never seen by anyone else.
11What does the Undefined lens show?
Handshakes that never happened — the unsent letter, the meeting missed by a day. They flicker as phantoms. If you believe one should have existed, you may burn it into the lattice; the scar is stored locally, in your browser.
12How do I share a specific view or handshake?
The URL follows you. ?lens= holds the lens you are in (for example ?lens=river), and ?h= holds the handshake panel you have open. Copy the address, or use the copy-link button inside the panel.
13What is the Brass chamber?
Brass is the eighth chamber — a transform, not a lens. Engage it and a band joins the song without replacing it: a trumpet section voiced from the track itself and a marching drum line locked to its beat, with five knobs — hero (trumpets), power (drums), pauses (band rests), density (section thickness), stadium (the room). It reads each track's band DNA locally, can play the knobs for you, and bypass is the default. The chamber is described on the lenses page.
14Who made The Lattice?
Designed, written, and composed by wxza — one person, one HTML file. There is no company behind it. More on the about page.