Show HN: Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker

5 days ago (visualnoise.ca)

This is a (silly, little) app which lets you make noise music using a color picker as an instrument. When you click on a specific point in the color picker, a bit of JavaScript maps the binary representation of the clicked-on color's hex-code to a "chord" in the 24 tone-equal-temperament scale. That chord is then played back using a throttled audio generation method which was implemented via Tone.js.

NOTE! Turn the volume way down before using the site. It is noise music. :)

13 comments

tevans3

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hecanjog  5 days ago

Lovely! Edit: you might want to consider adding a limiter to the output, it makes a lovely crackling effect but it's easy to flatline the output until it fizzles out completely, it'd be more curious to hear the denser textures.

  • tevans3  5 days ago

    Thanks! And thanks for that suggestion.

    I added a limiter to the output and an envelope to my synth object, but after a bunch of experimenting with different settings for each, the flatlining effect was still there. Throttling beyond the note+release's duration did fix it, but that also removed the layering effect of overlapping chords. I think some of those were interesting and wanted to keep them. The last thing I tried was setting the attack to 0.01 and I think that fixed the flatlining issue?

    • hecanjog  5 days ago

      Sounds great now -- I'm not getting the DC stuttering when I play around with different colors anymore.

      It seemed like the source is minified, but I didn't look that closely -- I'd be curious to hear more about your sonification scheme.

      Edit: nevermind I found a link to the source & explanation in another comment! https://github.com/tevans-3/synesthesia

bitwize  5 days ago

That's cool. I've been playing through the Quake Brutalist Jam collections recently, and this sounds almost like ambient music from one of those maps.

mcjiggerlog  5 days ago

RIP my phone's speakers. Maybe I should have read the post first..

  • tevans3  5 days ago

    I'm sorry, this was an oversight on my part!

    I adjusted the default volume, so that "painfully loud" is now opt-in by default...