Wise Rock Fish

The sound of Toga

Wise Rock Fish is the sound side of Spirit Strikers. A radio to listen to, and a studio where the game's music, voices and sound effects get made.

A world you can hear

Toga is the world of Spirit Strikers: shores, forests and open water, walked as a frog, a lizard or a monkey.

Every part of it is getting a sound of its own. Surf on the rocks. Open water under a boat. And when Dreamer Frog uses Moon Song, there has to be a song.

All of it is made here, one take at a time.

A painting from above: a camper truck, a rider on a trike and a running figure on a pale rock, with blue sea breaking all round it
An underwater painting: a spiny rockfish above a diver with red hair, a second fish below her, kelp on both sides and an orange sea bed

Paintings drawn on iPad Air.

The fish behind the name

His name is Evan, from even, the Hebrew word for stone. He is the Wise Rock Fish, one of the seven Spirit Strikers.

Evan, an upright orange rock fish, waving from terraced grey rock at the water's edge beside his small baby, who holds two drumsticks. Kelp streams in the blue water, and a sailboat, a beach, a red-roofed house and forest lie behind them
Evan and his baby at low tide on the home shore, in a test build of the game.

It drums

A real rockfish has no voice box. It drums on its own swim bladder, the bag of gas that keeps it afloat. Some drum when they fight over food.

Which is why the baby carries drumsticks.

It lives two hundred years

The oldest rockfish on record was caught off Alaska in 2000. The rings in its ear bone counted 205 years.

An underwater painting: a rockfish man waving from a stone pillar, a swimming rockfish, a frog, a brass diving machine, and a sunken purple city with a pyramid below them
Evan, the Wise Rock Fish. Drawn on iPad Air, 2025.

Where the facts come from: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (age); UC Berkeley (the calico); Hallacher, 1974 and Song and others, 2023 (sound).

The studio

A real sound editor that runs in the browser. Nothing to install.

  • Record a line straight from the microphone.
  • Cut, mute, fade and level it on the waveform.
  • Drag a coloured label over any stretch and say what you want there: mute this, make this longer, level this for film. An AI assistant reads the labels and does the edit.
  • Keep every take sorted by project, one click away.
Open the studioTry the open editor

The open editor is the same waveform editor without the library. Both are built on AudioMass, an open-source editor (MIT licence).

The studio: a list of projects and takes on the left, a waveform in the middle and coloured labels under it
A line from the opening film, with two labels on it

The radio

SomaFM is the inspiration for the music of Toga: deep space, tiki bars, secret agents, reggae. Forty-six stations, each one a record. Put one on while you work, and see whose song is playing.

SomaFM is commercial-free and paid for by its listeners. If a station becomes part of your day, support SomaFM.

Put a record on