# The Listener / Moiré Duet

A paper and glass bench study after Iana Kochu’s [The Listener](../../assets/the-listener.jpg). The long blue hook, its orange tongue and the smaller pink shape were hand-traced from the 1600 × 1067 source photograph. Those contours determine the sideways bend of Plate A’s lines. In the registered pair, aligned ink leaves more paper open, while offset ink covers more of it. Turn the front plate and those openings sweep into bands across the trace.

## Work the plates

- **Curl** puts the two plates in register at 0° and 0 mm.
- **Detuned** sets the upper plate to 4.4° and 0.12 mm. The curl breaks into diagonal bands.
- **Plate A** lifts the upper plate and shows the encoded grating alone.
- Turn and slide are native sliders. The arrow keys move one step and Home and End reach the bounds. Adjusting either slider sets the glass back down.

The browser composites the same two SVG ink paths used in print. It resolves their overlap at 10 pixels per millimetre before reducing it to the display size. The blue tint, paper grain, lighting and glass reflections are presentation layers. The circular opening is a centered clip over the square plates.

## Print the plates

| Item | Specification |
| --- | --- |
| A4 layouts | 210 × 297 mm portrait |
| Ink fields | Two 160 × 160 mm squares |
| Circular aperture | 136 mm diameter, centered, optional |
| Nominal pitch | 0.82 mm |
| Ink width | 0.37 mm |
| Maximum displacement of Plate A | About 0.40 mm |
| Turn range | −6° to +6° |
| Slide range | −0.82 mm to +0.82 mm |

1. Open [Plate A](print-a.svg) and [Plate B](print-b.svg) in a vector editor or print utility that honors the SVG page dimensions. Use A4 and **100% / Actual size**. Disable fit-to-page.
2. Print A on smooth white paper and B on clear transparency film made for the printer. Use dense black and the printer’s highest suitable quality. The 0.37 mm line is about 4.4 dots wide at 300 dpi and 8.7 dots at 600 dpi.
3. Measure each calibration rule between its end ticks. Both should measure 50 mm. Align the four corner marks of the two fields and place the ink surfaces as close together as possible.
4. View the pair head-on in diffuse light. Try a fraction of a millimetre of slide at registry, then turn the transparency about its center a few degrees. A 136 mm opening in an opaque mat crops the plate edges as in the browser.

The actual contrast depends on ink density, film haze, print scale and line registration. A physical print and assembly have yet to be tested.

## Reproduce and check

From this directory, run `node plates.mjs` to regenerate the standalone plates and the two A4 layouts. Run `node verify.mjs` to check the contour phase samples, pitch, matching geometry and physical page dimensions.

Serve the Kochu Studio directory from any static HTTP server. The prototype was checked in desktop Chromium and a 390 px touch viewport with Playwright, including the three presets, the keyboard slider controls and no-script mode. [Cover](cover.png) and [detuned](detuned.png) are 1200 × 900 browser captures of the art at those two settings.