A starling murmuration at dusk. Hundreds or thousands of birds wheel above an unseen roost, yet no bird leads, no bird can see the whole flock, and none knows where the cloud will turn next. Every ripple, split and shape-shift emerges from one fact: each bird simply watches a handful of its closest neighbours and copies them. It is the third great trick of self-organisation — not forces (Primordium) nor scent-trails (Mycelia, Formica), but pure alignment.
Balanced against a soft pull toward the roost, those three turn a scatter of dots into a single breathing body.
Real starlings track their seven nearest neighbours — near or far, always seven. This topological rule (the neighbours slider) is why a murmuration is scale-free: a turn by a few birds races across the entire flock at once, and the cloud stays whole however far it stretches. Most flocking toys use a fixed radius and lose this; here you can dial it in and feel the difference.
A murmuration finds its most beautiful shapes under threat. Drag across the sky and your cursor
becomes a hawk — the flock parts around it in a flashing bubble and seals shut behind. Toggle
the button to Lure instead and gather them. Or release the Falcon (key e): an
autonomous predator that hunts the densest knot of birds, for endless, hands-free drama.
Toggle Audio (the a key) and the flock conducts a generative ambient piece,
driven by its order — how aligned the birds are (the bar under the panel). Flying calm and as
one, the music is low and sustained; scattered by the hawk, it breaks into bright, anxious motion.
Synthesised live with the Web Audio API — no files, no network.
space pause · r randomize · m startle ·
e falcon · p palette · a sound ·
n re-flock · h hide panel · i this panel
A single self-contained HTML file · no libraries, no network, no assets. Real-time O(n) boids with topological neighbours on a spatial hash. A companion to Primordium, Mycelia & Formica. Built with Claude.