Building a browser sound game with Web Audio (why “listen first” beat live tweaking)

I’ve been chipping away at a tiny browser game called Dialed Sound Game —you hear a few short tones, then try to dial in each frequency from memory. Practice mode when you want warm-up, daily run when you want a shared “shape” to the challenge. No install, no account nonsense. This isn’t a write-up of every line of code. It’s the one design fight that saved the project. Early on I let people scrub the slider while the tone was still playing. Scores looked great; the thing felt hollow. You weren’t really remembering—you were chasing the needle. Splitting listen and guess made the game meaner at first, but it finally felt like the mechanic I’d described out loud to friends. Audio-wise, the web is “fine” until you care about loudness across frequencies and the way cheap speakers lie to you. I kept the listen sound on the softer side and avoided turning it into a piercing test tone. It’s supposed to be a casual loop, not a stunt. Stack-wise it’s Next.js on the surface and a lot of “schedul