Musical Toys: the site that turns math into melodies

Musical Toys is a free, hand-built collection of about nineteen small browser instruments, each one a single idea about sound dressed up in a retro terminal skin. It is worth a look because every toy hides a scrap of music theory or computer science behind one playful control, and most of them make something listenable within seconds.

In brief

• Musical Toys lives at https://musical.toys/ and gathers roughly nineteen interactive sound experiments under one CRT-styled roof.
• It is the work of Tim Holman, the creative developer behind The Useless Web, built with Preact, Tone.js and Hugo and hosted on Netlify.
• The toys range from a Musical Spirograph that sings its geometry to a Jazz Sketch pad, Pendulum Waves, a Binary Orchestra and a Drum Machine.
• Holman is open that he has little formal music training, so the site reads as a sketchbook for learning in public rather than a polished product.

What Musical Toys actually is

Musical Toys is a gallery, not a single gadget. The front page lays out a grid of named cards, Willowmere, Counterpoint, Night Market, Tetrachord, Binary Orchestra, Jazz Sketch, Polyrhythm, Wave Drawer, Pendulum Waves and more, each opening into its own full-screen instrument. There is no account, no paywall and no tutorial carousel. A visitor clicks a tile, meets one screen of controls, and starts making noise.

The whole thing is wrapped in a green-on-black terminal aesthetic, complete with a faint CRT scanline shimmer. That styling is a tell. These are not trying to look like professional audio software. They look like experiments, because that is exactly what the maker says they are.

The site describes itself plainly in its own words. Its meta description reads simply as a collection of interactive musical experiences, and the About page frames the project as experiments with sound and the Web Audio APIs, aimed at building small abstract tools for making music.

The maker behind the knobs

The FAQ answers the obvious question directly: Musical Toys was made by Tim Holman, as part of a wider personal collection he brands Tom's Toys, with his portfolio at tholman.com. That name carries weight on the playful end of the web.

Holman is the creator of The Useless Web, the button that fires visitors at a random pointless single-purpose site, which is practically a patron saint of this whole genre. His portfolio also lists Elevator.js, GitHub Corners and the Generative Artistry tutorials, and he has spoken at conferences including JSConf, CSS Conf EU and FFConf.

His day job sits a long way from any of that. Holman describes himself on his site as a tinkerer and tamperer drawn to fun and play in tech, while working as a senior engineering leader, most recently in user interface and experience at Goldman Sachs and previously at Bustle Digital Group. Musical Toys is the nights-and-weekends side of that career.

A tour of the cabinet

The quickest way to understand Musical Toys is to walk through a few of its rooms. Each toy takes a familiar object, a spirograph, a pendulum, a stave, and quietly wires it to sound.

The Musical Spirograph

The toy that earned the site press attention is the Musical Spirograph. Gizmodo covered it in August 2026, describing eight concentric circles that each stand for a musical note, with a point tracing epicycloid patterns, the loops a small circle draws as it rolls around a larger one, and sounding each note as it crosses the ring. The default is a C pentatonic scale, and sliders labelled Outer, Inner and Pen reshape the pattern.

Gizmodo called it "a pleasantly DIY take on generative music", and contrasted it with modern automated music tools, invoking Brian Eno rather than any AI generator. The appeal is that the sound is a direct read-out of the geometry on screen. Change the shape and the melody changes with it.

Jazz Sketch, Tetrachord and the drawing tools

Several toys turn drawing into composition. Jazz Sketch lets a visitor doodle a melody onto a stave and hear a small combo play it back. Tetrachord borrows the falling blocks of Tetris and reads the stack as a sequence. Wave Drawer hands over a waveform to sketch by hand. None of them demand that the user can read music. The gesture is the input, and the instrument fills in the harmony.

Physics and pattern toys

Other toys lean on physics and mathematics. Pendulum Waves recreates the classic science-museum demonstration in which a row of pendulums of slightly different lengths drifts in and out of phase, and maps that drifting into sound. Polyrhythm stacks beats that only line up occasionally. Gravity Drops bounces falling balls off musical bars. Binary Orchestra and Binary Piano turn ones and zeros into tones, a small nod to the computer science running underneath everything on the page.

The reference instruments

A handful of toys are closer to study aids than games. There is a Circle of Fifths, the diagram that maps how musical keys relate, a plain Metronome, a Drum Machine and a Cellular Sequencer that grows patterns from simple rules. Sound Bath and Night Market aim more at ambience than structure. The spread, from strict reference tool to loose generative texture, is what keeps the collection from feeling like one trick repeated.

The quieter corners

Not every toy announces itself. Counterpoint plays with two melodic lines moving against each other, the oldest trick in Western composition. Willowmere and Night Market lean toward mood pieces, generating soft evolving textures rather than tunes a person drives. Stranger Arp and Snapegiator sit in the arpeggiator family, rolling chords out one note at a time. Part of the pleasure of the cabinet is that its labels give almost nothing away, so each tile is a small wager on what it might do.

A short history the toys are quietly teaching

Several of these toys are reenactments of ideas much older than the browser. Generative music, the practice of setting up a system and letting it produce endless non-repeating output, predates any computer. The Gizmodo piece on the Musical Spirograph reached for Brian Eno, who has worked in that mode for decades, precisely to mark the distance between a transparent mechanical process and an opaque automated one.

That lineage is the hidden curriculum of Musical Toys. A pendulum rig, a rolling circle, a cellular automaton and a circle-of-fifths wheel are all systems that were studied long before they were turned into web pages. Rebuilding them as toys is a way of understanding why they produce the patterns they do. The site turns the reader into the person who sets the rules, then listens to what the rules decide.

Part of a larger workshop

Musical Toys is one wing of a much bigger building. Holman's portfolio groups his experiments into themed cabinets, and alongside the musical set there are Optical Toys full of illusions such as the Shepard Tone and the Thatcher Effect, plus collections themed around ants, mazes, paint, dice and poetry. Seen together, they describe a consistent method: take one idea, give it one screen, and let a visitor turn it over in their hands.

That context matters for anyone judging Musical Toys. It is not a one-off marketing stunt or a startup's weekend demo. It is the latest room in a years-long personal practice of building small, finishable things, which is why the toys feel of a piece with each other and why new ones keep appearing rather than the site freezing in place.

How it is built

Musical Toys is refreshingly honest about its plumbing. The FAQ lists the stack outright: Preact for the interface, Tone.js for audio synthesis, and Hugo to build the static site, all hosted on Netlify. That is a lightweight, modern setup with no heavy framework in sight.

Tone.js matters most here. It is a well-known open-source library built on top of the browser's native Web Audio API, and it handles the hard parts of timing, synthesis and scheduling that raw Web Audio makes fiddly. Holman notes in the FAQ that he leans on the library because, in his words, music theory is hard, and a good abstraction lets him focus on the idea rather than the signal processing.

The choice of a static-site generator is also telling. Each toy is essentially a self-contained page of JavaScript rather than a service that phones home. That keeps the site fast, cheap to run and durable, which is exactly the profile that lets small web toys survive for years rather than vanishing when a server bill lapses.

The computer science hiding in the fun

What lifts Musical Toys above a pile of noisemakers is that most toys are built on a real, nameable concept. The Musical Spirograph is a lesson in epicycloids. Pendulum Waves is a lesson in phase. The Circle of Fifths is a lesson in key relationships. Binary Orchestra is a lesson in base-two counting. The sound is the reward for poking at the maths.

Holman is candid that this is the point. The About page frames the project as a vessel for knowledge, a way to learn music and the history of generative systems by rebuilding small pieces of them. The FAQ even addresses the obvious modern suspicion, admitting that writing code with machine help played a part, while insisting the thinking and the structure were his.

That framing, build for curiosity rather than expertise, is a quietly radical stance in a web full of polished SaaS. The toys are allowed to be a little off. The maker says as much, inviting emails when a note sounds wrong. The imperfection is part of the invitation.

How it compares to the big labs

Browser instruments are not new territory. Google's Chrome Music Lab popularised the format with polished, classroom-friendly experiments, and Google's wider Experiments gallery has long collected sound and music demos from many makers. Those projects are backed by a large company and a design team, and it shows in their finish.

Musical Toys plays a different game. It trades that polish for personality and volume of ideas. Where a corporate lab ships a handful of immaculate demos, Holman ships many rougher ones, each carrying his own taste and his own willingness to leave a sharp edge exposed. The retro styling, the self-deprecating FAQ and the open invitation to email about bugs all signal a single human at the controls rather than a committee. For a certain kind of visitor, that is the entire appeal.

Why it belongs to the boring web

Musical Toys fits a long tradition of single-purpose, do-one-thing websites, the same tradition that The Useless Web was built to celebrate. It is not optimising for engagement or retention. It is a cabinet of small, finishable experiences that a person visits, enjoys and leaves, which is the whole ethos behind the Boring Websites collection and its siblings like Just Skedaddling.

There is a neat symmetry in finding this site through its maker. The person who built the definitive portal to pointless websites also quietly maintains a workshop of musical ones. Musical Toys is what The Useless Web points to when it is in a good mood: handmade, free, slightly strange and happy to waste a few minutes of anyone's afternoon.

Getting the most out of it

Musical Toys rewards a scattershot approach. The most productive way through is to open a toy, ignore the controls for a moment, make something, and only then start dragging sliders to hear what each one does. The CRT styling and sparse labels mean the controls reveal themselves through play rather than documentation.

The FAQ notes that many toys generate shareable URLs, so a pattern worth keeping can be sent to a friend rather than lost on refresh. Headphones help, since several toys lean on stereo movement and subtle timing that laptop speakers flatten. And since the maker actively welcomes feedback, a toy that sounds wrong is less a bug report than a conversation starter.

Above all, it is a site to leave open in a background tab. Sound Bath or a slow Pendulum Waves run can sit there humming while other work happens, which is a gentler relationship with a website than most of the modern web offers.

A note on craft and constraint

The constraint that defines Musical Toys is one screen per idea. Every instrument has to express itself inside a single view, with no menus to dig through and no settings to save. That forces a kind of clarity. A toy either reads at a glance or it fails, and the ones that survive on the grid are the ones that make their rule legible through play.

That discipline is harder than it looks. It is easy to bolt more features onto a music tool until it becomes a small digital audio workstation that no casual visitor will ever open twice. Holman's toys resist that pull. They stay small on purpose, which is why a person can meet one, understand it, enjoy it and move on inside a couple of minutes, then come back a week later and try another.

The payoff is a site that respects attention rather than farming it. Nothing here is trying to keep a visitor scrolling. Each toy is a complete little experience with a natural end, and the collection as a whole is a reminder that a website can simply be a nice place to spend five minutes and then leave.

FAQ

Who made Musical Toys?

Tim Holman, a creative developer best known for The Useless Web, Elevator.js and GitHub Corners, and currently a senior engineering leader at Goldman Sachs. Musical Toys is part of his personal Tom's Toys collection, documented on the site's own FAQ and on his portfolio at tholman.com.

Is Musical Toys free, and does it need an account?

Yes, it is free, and no account is required. Every toy at musical.toys opens straight in the browser with no sign-in, no app and no paywall. It is a static site, so each instrument runs locally in the page.

What is it built with?

According to the site's FAQ, Musical Toys uses Preact for its interface, Tone.js for audio synthesis on top of the Web Audio API, and the Hugo static-site generator, all hosted on Netlify. That keeps the toys fast and self-contained.

Do I need to know music theory to enjoy it?

No. The maker says plainly that he has little formal training and starts most toys from a visual or generative idea, then works backward into sound. The controls are designed to produce something listenable without any theory, which is much of the charm.