← Back to the table

Potluck Dinner Party · Night One

Pictures from the first dinner party.

Oct 1 · 2026 · 7pm to 2am

Our first one. Nine dishes came in under sound and music and we put them all out on one table, in one house, for one night.

Thank you to everyone who brought something. Every one of these got made by a person who wanted it to exist and then gave it away for free. That's the whole thing. These pictures are staying up, so come back and look whenever.

01
Photo not in yet/party/rub-a-dub-siren.jpg
A living room full of blurred dancers. In the middle stands a tower of red and gold speaker cabinets with striped arms raised over the crowd. In the foreground a man in a bucket hat laughs with his arm in the air; a woman in a yellow headwrap holds a plate. A long table of food runs the length of the room.

11pm and the speaker stack had arms. Nobody was asking about it anymore. Someone hit the air horn, the whole room lost it, and the jerk chicken just sat there for like twenty minutes.

MusicParty

Rub-A-Dub Siren

by DJFunkDubb

Reggae and dub sound effects: air horns, sirens, rewinds, all ready to drop live with a tap.

Open it →
02
Photo not in yet/party/blabberbox-3000.jpg
Two people side by side on a couch, both howling with laughter. On the left a woman with a big afro in an enormous neon yellow-green puffer suit, eyes shut, mouth wide open. Next to her a bearded man in a silver sequinned suit and gold bow tie wearing pink heart-shaped sunglasses, mouth open, holding a phone in both hands. The brass bell of a sousaphone sticks into frame on the right. The coffee table in front of them is buried in striped popcorn boxes, chip bags, wrappers and cans, lit by a lamp in the corner.

9pm. Silver suit, heart sunglasses, somebody's sousaphone in the corner that nobody touched all night. They ran twelve seconds of a voice through the robot preset and that was it, they were done. Popcorn and chips and cans the whole length of the table. Somebody forgot the blue raspberry cotton candy.

SoundPartyRecipe available

Blabberbox 3000

by MicMangler

Record up to 12 seconds of your voice and mangle it with 20 silly presets: pitch shifting, robot ring mod, distortion, echo, and more. Save the result as a WAV to share.

Open it →
03
Photo not in yet/party/sa-31l.jpg
A squat robot built out of old radio parts stands on a patterned rug in a dim dining room: a receiver for a head with two big glowing green dials for eyes, and a chest panel packed with dozens of small red, blue, green and amber meters. A man in a tan corduroy blazer crouches beside it, pushing his glasses up and squinting at his phone. A sideboard behind him is covered in platters, a bowl of fritters and a green beer bottle; two guests watch from the doorway.

1am. He got down on the rug to check whether the bands on the app matched the ones on its chest, glasses pushed up, squinting at both. It had been standing next to the food all night with its eyes glowing and nobody had really addressed that.

SoundPartyRecipe available

SA-31L: Sound Analyzer & Warper

by FishH3aDz

A pocket spectrum analyzer styled like a vintage hi-fi rack: watch 31 bands of LED meters dance to whatever's playing, then capture 30 seconds and mangle it with a finger-drawn EQ, tape-speed warping, and a dub echo.

Open it →
04
Photo not in yet/party/hyphony.jpg
A long dining table under a warm pendant lamp, packed shoulder to shoulder with people laughing. A man with locs in a patterned sweater laughs with his eyes shut. An old black typewriter sits on the table beside a casserole dish, paper still in the roller, with a laptop glowing further down.

8pm, long table, candles already half gone. Someone put a typewriter down next to the mac and cheese. We spent about an hour typing each other's names in to find out which of us sounded good together.

Sound

Hyphony

by DMTass1

Type in a word and it becomes its own pitch and waveform. Type two and listen to the interval they grow into together, then shape it with memory, density, volume, and room controls.

Open it →
05
Photo not in yet/party/dial-table-radio.jpg
On a back deck under string lights, a small cream-colored radio robot with two glowing orange dials for eyes and two antennae sits on a picnic table. Three guests lean in around it, smiling. Plates of empanadas, burgers and salad crowd the table; the yard beyond is deep blue dark.

Midnight on the deck. The radio had eyes, which took everyone a second. It landed on a station from somewhere really far away and those three just leaned in and listened. Empanadas went cold.

MusicSoundRecipe available

DIAL: Table Radio

by StaticSallie

A tabletop radio for your browser. Tune live stations from a community catalog, near you or anywhere across any state, snap your favorites onto six presets, and twist the bass, treble, and echo until it sounds like the right room.

Open it →
06
Photo not in yet/party/hsl-noise.jpg
A dark living room flooded with magenta and blue light. A figure in a glowing translucent magenta suit and hood sits on the arm of the couch holding a blue cup. Three friends sit laughing around a laptop, one in a tie-dye hoodie. The table in front holds platters of rainbow-colored food.

2am, den, everything pink. We could not agree on which color sounded the most like rain. Whoever was in the glowing suit refused to weigh in.

SoundToy

HSL-Noise

by MitPitt

An experiment in mapping colors onto noise. Hue sets the center frequency, saturation sets the bandwidth, lightness cuts or expands the curve, and transparency makes it sparse and grainy. Share the exact sound by copying the URL.

Open it →
07
Photo not in yet/party/subcom.jpg
A wood-panelled basement rec room. A large pale drum machine the size of a suitcase sits on the coffee table, its pads glowing pink and blue. A woman in a tie-dye shirt leans over it mid-motion while another dances behind her. A whole pizza, a plate of tater tots and scattered soda cans surround it.

1am, basement. Four lights going around in circles, one pizza, an unreasonable number of tater tots, and two people who had clearly decided they lived here now.

MusicSoundRecipe available

SUBCOM

by Unknown

A drum machine you play by dragging. Four contacts move around a circular scope: near the middle is a plain two-step groove, the outer field is the busy broken version. FX pads, echo, reverb, tap tempo, and a DROP button.

Open it →
08
Photo not in yet/party/nowhere-right-now.jpg
A backyard fire pit at night behind a brick house. A woman in a headscarf stands holding a tablet, lit by the fire. Guests sit in camp chairs around the flames, one listening with his eyes down. Mugs, a thermos and small plates cover a low table in the foreground; a laptop glows blue at the edge of frame.

Midnight, out by the fire. She pulled up the weather somewhere thousands of miles away and held it out so everyone could hear. The whole circle went quiet for a second. Then everybody wanted to do theirs.

SoundArt

Nowhere, Right Now

by xthreadmaker

Pick any spot on earth and listen to its weather. Live conditions become generative ambient music: temperature sets the key, wind and cloud push the mode and tempo, and it plays over a slow aerial view of the place.

Open it →
09
Photo not in yet/party/cyanotype.jpg
A dining room under two warm lampshades, cold blue light through the blinds behind. A woman in a cream knit sweater leans over a long paper scroll unrolled down the table, drawing wavering blue lines with a pen. A crowd stands watching, one filming on his phone. Bowls of blueberries and a dish of deep blue sit along the table edge.

10pm. Three blue lines crawling down a roll of paper the whole length of the table, drawn by whatever was playing at the time. And yes, somebody brought blueberries on purpose.

SoundArt

Cyanotype

by Unknown

A plotting table for sound. Play music nearby and three frequency bands draw themselves across the paper in slow blue ink. Feed it the microphone, open an audio file, or run its demo tones, then pull at sensitivity and speed.

Open it →
The host near the end of the night in a flat cap and tweed jacket, holding a plate of jerk chicken and rice, smiling. Red and green light, dub reggae posters and a speaker cabinet behind him, guests still talking around him.
Two friends in a living room lit purple and blue by party lights. One kneels on the rug singing into a microphone with his head back; beside him the host, in a gold sequin jacket and a black cap, plays a plastic guitar controller with one arm thrown up. Bookshelves and LED strips glow behind them.

1:59 am

Everybody had a good time.

That's me at the end of it with the last of the jerk chicken. Nine dishes, one table, a house full of people who mostly didn't know each other when they walked in.

And then that happened. Somebody found the guitar controller, I had packed a gold sequin jacket for reasons I'm not going to get into, and that was the rest of the night.

Thank you to everyone who made something and just handed it over for free. That's the only reason any of this works.

So what should November be?

There's another one coming in November, and the theme is wide open. Tell me what you'd want to cook with. A category, a mood, a constraint, a stupid idea you want an excuse to build — all fair.

No wrong answers, and you don't have to be planning to make something to suggest one.