Rain outside. Music on. Jack asleep.

How to use it

The screen opens filling your browser window. Press Play the music, and after a few seconds the controls fade away and the mouse pointer hides, leaving just the picture. Move the mouse or tap the screen to bring the controls back. The music button opens a small panel where you can change the station, the volume, the rain and the scene. The full-screen button hides the browser too. The page button, or Esc (twice from full screen), brings you back here.

Late night has the city lights across the street and the lamps turned low. Rainy evening is earlier, with the last of the blue still in the sky. Hammock under the trees takes Jack outside at dusk, swinging gently between two gums under a string of festoon lights, with crickets and the rain on the lawn. Turn the rain up or down with the slider and set the sound of the rain separately, so you can have a downpour with the music on top, or untick Music playing for just the rain.

About the music

There are twelve stations, and none of them is a recording. Each one is a small band written in code and played live in your browser:

• Late-night jazz, Easy swing and Bright jazz: walking double bass, brushes or a ride cymbal, electric piano and a saxophone, flute or vibraphone that improvises now and then.
• Lo-fi beats: dusty electric piano, lazy swung drums, a deep bass and a bit of vinyl crackle.
• Bossa nova: nylon-string guitar, rim clicks, a shaker and a flute.
• Solo piano: slow, unhurried playing with plenty of pedal.
• Ambient drift: warm pads and the odd chime, with no beat at all.
• Midnight drive: synthwave arpeggios, soft drums and an echoing lead.
• Dub in the rain: a one-drop beat, deep bass and lots of echo.
• Fireside harp: rippling harp in six-eight time.
• Zen garden: koto, bamboo flute and a far-off gong.
• Music box: a lullaby that slows down as the spring winds down.

Each station plays common chord progressions in a new key every “track”, and every note is chosen as it goes, so it never repeats exactly. Each track even gets a made-up name, shown in the corner when it starts. Tick Shuffle and it moves to another station after each track, like a radio. The rain is made the same way, from filtered noise, with drops tapping on the window and the odd drip off the gutter.

Because it’s generated rather than recorded, there’s no third-party track behind it, so you’re welcome to play it in a shop, an office or on a stream.

About Jack

Jack is real. He’s a retired greyhound, he lives with us, and roughly twenty hours of his day look exactly like this: horizontal, on his own leather sofa, under a blanket he has asked for. The picture is drawn rather than filmed, but the breathing, the twitching paws when he dreams and the occasional ear flick are all taken from life. Read more about Jack.

He’s also the reason Chill Domains works the way it does: quick when it counts, quiet the rest of the time. Register a domain in a few minutes, pay the same price at renewal, and get plain reminders instead of scare emails. Then go back to the sofa.

Good places to put it

• A TV on a wet weekend. Open this page in the TV’s browser, or cast a Chrome tab, and go full screen.
• A second monitor while you work, with the rain on and the lo-fi or piano down low.
• A café, shop or waiting room that could do with a calmer corner.
• A stream. Press Copy picture-only link and add it as a browser source in OBS. It opens straight into the picture with no buttons (untick Show the time first if you don’t want the clock). It starts silent, like any web page: to hear the music, right-click the source in OBS, choose Interact, click the picture and press S.