Orca is an esoteric programming language, designed to create procedural sequencers in which each letter of the alphabet is an operation, where lowercase letters operate on bang, uppercase letters operate each frame. It was created by hundred rabbits, a research studio on a sailboat.
Orca is not a synthesizer, but a flexible livecoding environment capable of sending MIDI, OSC & UDP to your audio/visual interfaces, like Ableton, Renoise, VCV Rack or SuperCollider.
For the purposes of this site, we've connected some drum racks and synthesizers from Enfer in the bottom right and are patching them in as virtualized midi instruments. Normally, Orca will not make sound on its own, and rather just sends messages or data to external devices or programs. Orca and Enfer are both creations of Devine Lu Linvega.
Orca can be navigated a number of ways. You can try clicking a particular coordinate on the grid, or use the arrow keys to move the cursor around. Conveniently, you can also see a lot of navigational commands by opening the javascript console. When Orca starts, it prints out a number of commands:
Move North............... ArrowUp
Move East................ ArrowRight
Move South............... ArrowDown
Move West................ ArrowLeft
Move North(Leap)......... CmdOrCtrl+ArrowUp
Move East(Leap).......... CmdOrCtrl+ArrowRight
Move South(Leap)......... CmdOrCtrl+ArrowDown
Move West(Leap).......... CmdOrCtrl+ArrowLeft
Orca also has the concept of a selection. You can hold down shift to make it larger.
Scale North.............. Shift+ArrowUp
Scale East............... Shift+ArrowRight
Scale South.............. Shift+ArrowDown
Scale West............... Shift+ArrowLeft
Scale North(Leap)........ CmdOrCtrl+Shift+ArrowUp
Scale East(Leap)......... CmdOrCtrl+Shift+ArrowRight
Scale South(Leap)........ CmdOrCtrl+Shift+ArrowDown
Scale West(Leap)......... CmdOrCtrl+Shift+ArrowLeftl
Lastly, there is a concept of a cursor mode, kind of like VIM. Normally, typing will only edit values under the head of the cursor (the @ sign). If you switch to insert mode, you can type and the cursor head will auto advance.
Toggle Insert Mode....... CmdOrCtrl+I
Toggle Block Comment..... CmdOrCtrl+/
Trigger Operator......... CmdOrCtrl+P
Reset.................... Escape
Orca utilizes a unique base-36 number system: