Tokoshie is one piece of music with no beginning and no end. Open it and it is already
playing; close it and it stops. There is nothing to press.
It does not wait for you. Silence it and it goes on unheard; when the sound comes back,
it is wherever it has got to.
Thirty-two chords, held one at a time. Each moves on to a chord it shares no note with, and never
straight back to the one it came from. How long a chord is held, and how long the change takes,
is drawn anew every time, so the piece does not fall into a loop and does not repeat.
There is only one of it. It began on 9 September 2026 and has been going since, whether or not
anything was playing it; opening the app joins it where it is. Everyone hears the same chord at
the same moment, wherever they are.
The screen
Two chord names, one above and one below, and a single hand like the minute hand of a clock.
While the hand is in the upper half, the upper name is what you are hearing; in the lower half,
the lower name. The hand crosses the horizontal at the moment one chord has fully given way to the
next. The name it has left behind fades, and the next chord's name arrives in its place before the
hand comes round to it.
The one thing you can set
- Double-tap anywhere
- A slider appears. It sets the pace: the number shown is roughly how many seconds a chord
lasts, from seven to fifty-six. The change takes effect from the next chord, not the current one,
so the hand never jumps. The slider goes away on its own after eight seconds, or on another
double-tap.
- Remembered
- The pace you leave it at is kept, and the next launch begins at that pace. A pace is a piece
of its own — everyone at the same pace hears the same thing — so changing it means joining that
piece where it is now.
- A key, under About
- Leave it empty and you hear the piece everyone hears, at the moment they hear it. Write a word
of your own and the piece is yours: the same on any device given the word, and no one else's.
- About, at the bottom of the screen
- The name, the version, and the privacy policy.
Locking the phone
Tokoshie keeps playing with the screen off and with other apps in front. The Lock Screen and
Control Center show it — the name, the mark, and a pause. That is all there is: no next, no
previous, no timeline, because there is no track and no position in it. Pause it there and the
sound stops, not the piece: it goes on unheard, and when you press play, or open the app again,
it is wherever it has got to, opening out of silence the way it does at launch.
When another app starts playing sound, or a call comes in, Tokoshie goes quiet and comes back
once it can — further on, by however long it was quiet. To stop it for good, close the app.
Privacy
Tokoshie collects nothing and sends nothing. It has no network code at all. The pace is the one
thing it keeps, and it keeps it on the device.
Privacy policy
Requirements
iPhone or iPad, iOS 17 or later. Upright on the phone; on the iPad any way up, in a window of
whatever size you give it. Dark whatever the system is set to.
Headphones or a speaker are worth it: the chords sit low, and a phone's own speaker loses the
bottom of them.
Contact
. It reaches one person, so give it a day or
two.