Making a Flute-Controlled Mouse | Hacker News Reader

Making a Flute-Controlled Mouse

0110.be

56 pointskaycebasques25 comments

The remote possibilities here are staggering. If we could send beeps in the human vocal range over phone lines to control things, it could revolutionize telephony!

Just be sure that cereal box giveaways don't whistle at the same frequencies (aren't tuned to concert pitch?)

Ha! In case you're one of today's lucky 10,000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper

Very cool but you wouldn't get very far in an FPS by sending one event at a time. This way you can't did things like strafe turning or shoot while walking.

A flute normally has about 2 octaves of diatonic notes, certainly true for a recorder. I'd suggest expanding the number of usable notes so that some could be used for compound commands.

In saying that, what would be even better, would be to allow the use multiple notes at ones, polyphonic instruments, so that chords could be used for this effect. Say you play a C to walk forwards, a G to strafe right, and E to shoot, then a C major triad could be played to do all these things simultaneously. A flute quartet could maybe play the game together.

Maybe the flute's pitch could be decoded back into the required fingering combination. This way the player could treat each hole as an individual button. The actual notes might not all sound musical (or be properly distinguishable).

That's a cool idea but subtlety of those differences would be much, much more complex to pick up and everything would certainly need to be recalibrated for every different model of flute whereas the current solution would work for flute tuned A=440Hz

Why is this not called PiedPiper?!?!

The post links to a prior implementation: https://www.reddit.com/r/JustGuysBeingDudes/comments/195gqnm... where it shown being in a FPS video game.

Top comment there is: "The Pied Sniper" (!)

That clip appears to be from https://www.twitch.tv/deanobeano/clip/CharmingDoubtfulCattle... (note: brief profanity at the end of the clip).

Does it work with whistling? You could control your mouse like that character from Guardians of the Galaxy!

I made a game like this the other day just for fun! It worked pretty well but it's more of a novelty and not really fun to whistle for more than 30s.

Or even talk to your computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language

Yes, I made a game that you controlled by whistling, back in 2018 with the WebAudio API.

My version of the cursor kept a continuous scan velocity horizontally across the screen, and you controlled the y-axis via pitch. Button presses were (intentional) collisions.

It's like a reverse Theremin

Instant thought: forte and fortissimo increase velocity or maybe specific chords.

How long until someone speed runs Ocarina of Time on an ocarina?

It would be great if it could subtract the music that is playing.

Need to add the ability to control acceleration with volume.

Love it. I did something similar with mapping a digital piano to keyboard events. With a whole band we can control a computer

I would use that with a drawing software to turn any shittyflute tune into a piece of art.

This is the future!

:)

Can not love it more!!!!!

This is hilarious. Reminds me of the YID (yelling input device) I made for the stupid shit hackathon in 2018[1]. Playing with alternative ways to control systems is a fun exercise in creativity.

[1]: https://github.com/carlsverre/yid

Who do I need to annoy to make another Stupid Shit Hackathon happen??

HN never disappoints on weekends. I especially liked the sharper note to click the mouse button.

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