No map here. This browser can’t draw it: the map needs graphics acceleration (WebGL), which is switched off or unavailable.
Everything else works. Find a place by name or by lat, lng, and hear it through any vocabulary.
lat, lng
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Tuning up…
what3sounds gives every place on Earth an address, and lets many people say what that address sounds like.
It grew out of what3chords, a satire of what3words. what3words has one word list, owned by one company, and presents it as the place’s address. what3chords copied that move with one table of guitar chords, so the chords came across as the place’s chords, when they are really the guitar’s chords applied to the place. The table hides who chose it.
Here the two things are pulled apart. The address is shared: a point falls in a grid cell, and the cell becomes one large number. The number means nothing by itself. A codebook is a vocabulary that someone has contributed, and it reads the number as a few of its own sounds. At a given cell size the same spot always has the same number. It sounds one way through one codebook and another way through the next. Only the address belongs to the place. Each sound belongs to the people who wrote the codebook, and the page says who they are.
Codebooks are not assigned by territory. Any vocabulary can be heard anywhere, so it is for its contributors, not this page, to decide whether that is acceptable for their material, and on what terms.
One codebook is the guitar chord table of the original what3chords. The others are demonstrations written for this page so that there is something to hear: they are nobody’s tradition, and say so. Real codebooks need contributors. How to contribute one.
A web page cannot enforce anything. A codebook’s terms and Local Contexts labels are shown, and the page behaves as they ask (it will hide the download button, or leave a codebook off its list), but anyone can copy what a web page loads. Material that should be restricted should not go into an open web page at all.
And the address layer is still anonymous: a global grid, applied everywhere from outside. You can change which grid, hexagons or pentagons, but not who drew it. Plural codebooks fix half of the view-from-nowhere problem. They make the other half easier to see.
Preview: the text on this page was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, working from the authors’ design note. The authors have not yet reviewed it.