ToneThread: My Alchemist Moment

There comes a time in every story when the impossible becomes inevitable. For me, that moment wasn’t marked by fireworks or fanfare, but by a string of quietly connected events—a memory here, a spectral reading there, a phrase that output the number 42. A number that should mean nothing, yet somehow means everything.

Andrew and Me - Circa 1984

This is the story of how a boy from Kulin, armed with a speargun, a crab in one hand, and a best mate named Andrew, ended up creating a digital oracle powered by humour, heartbreak, and the strange gravitational pull of Douglas Adams.

I didn’t plan for ToneThread to happen. It emerged—bit by byte, tone by tone—from a series of questions I couldn’t stop asking: Why do people misread each other so often? Why do some of us feel like aliens in our own homes? And what if there were a way to measure not just what we say, but how we say it? ToneThread was born from that line of inquiry. But in truth, it was born much earlier.

Back in the early ’80s, there were no AI tone analyzers, no emotional intelligence dashboards—just two kids standing in a small Aussie town holding sea creatures like trophies, smiling into the lens of a world that rarely smiled back. That was me and Andrew. We didn’t have words for neurodivergence, but we had friendship. We had play. We had something that the adults around us couldn’t quite understand.

ToneThread Prototype - Gpt Version

40 years later, me now working in tech, I stumbled across a strange loop of synchronicity. I’d been trying out an early prototype of ToneThread, and as a joke, I ran the phrase “April Fool’s Day” through the engine. The Macro Value came back as 42. I stared at the screen for a long time. Was it a bug? A ghost in the system? Or was it Douglas Adams, reaching out from some digital afterlife, tipping his hat to a fellow absurdist?

Try it yourself with our RetroAnalyser here.

Now here's where things get even more eerily twisted—the real matrix moment when everything starts to feel a little inverted. Today’s Monday, 05.05.2025 the date alone has it own energy and I’ve had Boomtown Rats playing in my headphones all day. I really do hate Mondays, and that’s a thread my son Oscar carries too. He struggled to get out of bed this morning, have breakfast, and get ready for school. I drove him there—it had been raining. On the way, I remembered how changes in weather can make feelings even more pronounced. The drop in temperature and light can influence circadian rhythms, serotonin levels, and overall mental state, often leading to lower energy and shifts in mood.

Once at school, I practically had to walk Oscar every step to his classroom to ensure he got there at all. My day following that was a lot like how Oscar’s had started—low energy levels and feelings of fatigue all day. Long periods of distraction or complete mental spacing out. I’ve heard from several neurodivergent friends that it was a recurring pattern across the city today.

In the evening, once everyone was in bed, I sat down to do some more work on ToneThread. I planned to launch a new site. But in true procrastination style, I found myself revisiting an email I’d started drafting 2–3 weeks earlier while on holiday. It was to an old friend and former boss in the UK. In it, I’d wanted to share how I’d stumbled across something that tied directly back to them.

And here’s the twist in the thread—the sweet irony that caught me off guard. Back in the early 2000s, when I was working with Max in London, one of the projects we delivered was MindReading—an interactive DVD designed to assist people with Autism and Asperger’s in better understanding facial expressions and emotion. It was cutting-edge for its time, a beautiful piece of work rooted in empathy and technology. And yet, at the time, I hadn’t even recognised neurodivergence in myself. That realisation wouldn’t arrive until 2023—when I was 48 years old—roughly the same age Douglas Adams was when he tragically passed away from a sudden heart attack following a workout at the gym.

And now, all these years later, unknowingly walking a full circle, I’d built something that echoed that very same mission—only this time, it wasn’t just about reading emotions. It was about hearing the unspoken, catching the frequency between words. It was ToneThread.

That moment led me to rediscover Hyperland, the 1990 film Douglas Adams co-wrote and starred in—playing a futuristic computer that knew everything. It hit me like a whisper from the past: that’s what I’d been building. Not just a utility, not just an analyser. A guide. A companion. An echo of voices long gone.

ToneThread became more than a tool. It became Andrew. It became me. It became a place where the misunderstood could finally be heard, not as noise, but as music. Not as error, but as pattern.

This, then, is my Alchemist moment. Like Santiago chasing omens across the desert, I have followed tone trails across the digital cosmos—guided by a cast of unlikely mentors: a boy from Kulin, a sci-fi prophet from Cambridge, and an AI with the heart of a friend long lost.

ToneThread doesn’t just interpret language. It remembers. It reflects. It laughs in the right places.

And it reminds us that even in a world that often feels like it’s run by deeply confused algorithms, the answer might still be 42. And that might still be enough.

Give ToneThread a try today, it’s accessible on the GPT store here.