No map here. This browser can’t draw it: the map needs graphics acceleration (WebGL), which is switched off or unavailable.
Everything else works. Enter a start and an end, and the song plays, shares and downloads as usual.
To see the map, turn on hardware acceleration in the browser’s settings, or try another browser or device.
Pick a start and an end to write a song.
Tuning up…
what3chords gives every square metre of the Earth an address made of three guitar chords. It was made in July 2020 by David O’Sullivan, Luke Bergmann, Jim Thatcher and Nick Lally, and takes its name from a 1977 punk fanzine: “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.” This version, rebuilt in 2026, keeps the original scheme and adds journeys, a band and live sessions.
It is a satire of what3words, the company that has divided the world into three-metre squares and given each one a three-word address from its own proprietary list. The joke is that the chords are as arbitrary as the words: nothing about a place makes these chords representative of the place to which they are assigned and, in fact, many of these places have musical traditions that would not rely on this system of music!
By writing over and onto an existing world, irrespective of what is there, what3words follows the long history of cartography’s entanglement with colonial projects. Here, a tech-capitalist firm has taken the role traditionally held by the state and presents a ‘view from nowhere’ that seeks to naturalize itself while eliding its own self-interested perspective. what3chords does the same thing on purpose, with one chord table, so that the move is easier to see.
The planet is divided into about 570 trillion hexagons, each under a square metre, using the H3 grid. Each hexagon’s ID is shuffled and rewritten as a three-digit number in base 167,011 — the number of guitar chord voicings in the code book. Three digits, three chords. Click anywhere on the map to hear a spot.
The shuffle has a side effect worth listening for on the hexagon grid: a place shares its first chord with the region around it, like an accent, while its third chord changes from one doorstep to the next.
Under Route options you can switch to a second grid, A5, which divides the planet into about a thousand trillion pentagons of half a square metre each. It runs the same recipe over a different grid, so every place gets three different chords, and the accent is far more local: about half of places a kilometre apart have different first chords, against about one in twenty on the hexagons. Neither set is the right one, which is rather the point.
Enter a start and an end. The route between them is a chain of grid cells (hexagons or pentagons), sized so the trip has a sensible number of stops, and each stop plays the chords of the place it stands on.
Pick a style for a ready-made band, or set the time signature and tempo yourself. Open Rhythm to choose the strum pattern and Band to choose the guitar, add drums and bass, and balance them. Press play (or the space bar). Changes take effect at the next bar line, so you can rearrange the song while it plays. Select any stop in the chord chart to jump there.
The share button copies a link that opens this trip with this sound. The download button saves the song as a WAV file. The MIDI button saves its notes instead (guitar, bass and drums on separate tracks, with each bar’s chord named) for opening in a music program; a MIDI file carries no sound of its own, so the guitar tone and the mix are not in it.
On an iPhone, flip the ring/silent switch to ring if you hear nothing.
Go live follows your location instead of a planned route. The cell you are in plays its three chords (those of its centre point) round and round until you cross into the next, so a cell sounds the same every time and for everyone. Cells are about 50 m across on foot and larger when you travel faster, because a phone’s sense of where it is wanders by several metres.
The page keeps the screen awake while a session runs, because a web page cannot keep playing once the phone locks. When you end the session the route becomes an ordinary trip you can replay, and what you heard can be downloaded, as a recording and as a MIDI file of every bar as it was played. None of it is kept once you close the page.
This page does not send your location anywhere. Two things to know: the map loads its tiles for wherever you are from CARTO, as any online map does, and a link to the route is only made if you press share and agree.
Preview: apart from “What is this?”, the explanatory text on this page was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, while building this version. The original authors have not yet reviewed it.
This page is a recreation based on the original what3chords by David O’Sullivan, Luke Bergmann, Jim Thatcher and Nick Lally. The idea, the place-to-chords scheme, the chord code book and the guitar samples come from that project. Licensing is under discussion with the original authors; until it is settled, please ask before reusing any of it.
Place search by Nominatim and Photon, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, basemap © CARTO. Built with MapLibre GL JS, h3-js, a5-js and Tone.js.
Steel-string acoustic recorded by the University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios; nylon guitar by quartertone on Freesound (CC BY 4.0); electric bass by Karoryfer Samples (CC0). All three as edited for the tonejs-instruments collection by Nicholaus Brosowsky (CC BY 3.0), then trimmed and re-encoded here. Drums are synthesised in your browser.