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Noise

noise.jake.fun

632 pointsamadeuspagel84 comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64liF2VuLxI Ratatat - Loud Pipes

Almost there :).

Man, those two first Ratatat albums had such a great sound. I’m not quite sure how they created it but I saw them play in a little club in London and it was every bit as full and textured as on the albums. I have a recording of the gig somewhere.

Share it kindly, I’m pleading you.

I think their sound was created by time reversing guitar notes? I was never clear how it would be possible to play that live?

when I saw them live ~18 years ago they made heavy use of gradual fade ins (swells) with an ernie ball volume pedal, it does have a similar sound to a reverse delay effect.

Yeah, that was about the same time when I saw them. From memory they just looked like your standard 3 piece but had those lovely backwards sounding swells. I recall being really surprised because it sounds like the sort of thing you’d struggle to do live.

Such an actually underrated band. That album, Classics, as well as their entire discography is a work of art.

The way they layer sounds is so intricate and dynamic, it pulls you in from the start and keeps you hooked with every listen.

Also the Ratatat Remixes Vol. 1 & 2 are just genius. One of my favourites : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVHCR3W5ITo

Never before seen on HN, must upvote favorite song and take the hit for saying so.

I don’t get the reference with Loud Pipes

moving around on the noise site, you can get it to resemble parts of loud pipes, especially at around 2:35 [1] with the repeated upward bits

https://youtu.be/64liF2VuLxI?t=155

Thanks for taking the time to explain, I was chasing my tail looking for something visual

Fuck, I spent a few minutes thinking I had heard something similar somewhere and you solved the mistery, thank you so much.

I got more of a Ratatat - Tacobel Canon vibe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=use8dcTn4tI

It really great I completely agree

I don't think I've ever seen a video with 26M views, but no description.

It appears you can get different modes using search params <https://github.com/ja-k-e/noise/blob/main/Sound.js#L8>

Using locrian as the default is wild <https://github.com/ja-k-e/noise/blob/main/Sound.js#L26C6-L26...>

To use it, do you have to add a mode parameter like so?

https://noise.jake.fun/?mode=major

Yuppers.

The default chords from left to right sound pretty standard in my ears: vii⁰, I, ii, iii, IV, V, vi - but maybe it's locrian if you take the leftmost chord to be the tonic, and a plain major if you take the second from the left to be the tonic?

The source code is posted on the author's github, by the way:

https://github.com/ja-k-e/noise

He has some files named after GPT3 and GPT4. I wonder what that's about

looks like they were playing around with getting gpt to write some code to render the particles

Particles.js

Particles2d.js

ParticlesGPT3.js

ParticlesGPT4-meh.js

ParticlesGPT4.js

Complete aside, but Jake of jake.fun is an absolute delight. I work with him over at Figma and he’s such a genuine person who makes little nuggets like this on a constant basis. He’s one of those people who make tech a fun industry to be in.

Very cool. It would be good to support multi touch, letting the user instantly switch to another noise by reacting to the latest finger. You would need to use viewport meta to disable page zoom as well.

I was thinking multitouch as well, but more about chords than sequential noises.

They are already chords.

The chords are the best part of this, makes everything sound good and in tune

Absolutely. I sooo wanted to tap a snare or drum with my thumb while playing the chord with my index finger.

Nice, you can also pass other modes and keys (root notes) as URL search params. It’s G locrian by default.

https://github.com/ja-k-e/noise/blob/3c90aadf4db49505878a203...

Reminds me of https://soundbox.cognable.com/ which we use to interest disabled children in touch screens, preparing for a talker.

If you’ve ever been by a Tesla coil in person, that static-y noise near the top of the screen is almost a perfect match.

How come it sounds like discrete notes even thought I move continuously? Like I can move around a bit and the note doesn't change very much and then all of a sudden it changes in a discrete jump?

Half steps https://github.com/ja-k-e/noise/blob/main/NoteToFrequency.js...

Quantising the oscillator pitch into discrete steps like this is pretty common when it comes to synthesisers. Generally there is also a fine-tuning control that allows the user to offset the output by up to an octave. Makes it easier to not be out-of-tune with other instruments.

This is fun, and the whole website is full of funny and creative projects like this! Well done!

this is what i gather: up is noise, down are notes, left to right are different frequencies higher to lower, white dots are noise, color dots are sound frequencies, dots are a visual indication of what components the sound u r hearing is composed of.

Up is a high-pass filter, down is a low-pass filter, left and right moves between different chords.

Too much melody, not enough noise. The brain needs to be stimulated better. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0z5lCJUAge5gHjCFGZNnqQ?si=... (Spotify artists removed lot of their songs in between)

This is really nice, the ability to add more and make chords would be interesting, though most might be pretty dissonant I guess.

The chord progression is i^o II iii iv V VI vii, which are the successive triads of a locrian scale, which is like a major scale but you start from the 7th note of the scale (ti). In this case, use A flat major, but start on G.

Absolutely excellent. It bought me much joy to have a pad like this (that used to cost me money) pop up on the front page of HN to stick my finger into.

It doesn't work on firefox (no error message in console) and it works on chrome.

I found making a white - purple - red - white triangle over and over pleasing.

A possible improvement: add filter resonance control assigned to mouse wheel.

Multi-tap is not supported it seems. Could've been a nice thing to have.

This is incredible. Do you know what you've done?

You've created an instrument!

Kaoss Pad!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaoss_Pad

Does it work with multiple inputs on touch screens?

No, and that was not a limitation for me. Restrictions often lead to more creativity. Embrace that.

but at the same time a multitouch version would be cool. Why don’t you make one?

Also, the author needs to add something like user select none on touchscreen and make it aggressive because otherwise iOS Likes to select anything You tap too long. iOS is sticky and easy and eager to please like that ha ha ha!

Wow, this is like something I'd find on the Bored Button website.

woah my earplugs were at 100% volume, what a jumpscare. but nice tool!

Looks cool. Is it Fractional Brownian Motion or Simplex?

"Cloudflare, what is best in life?" "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of the Patent Trolls."

Neal fun, Jake fun, who's next?

While not as impressive, I have a small set of fun pages here: https://susam.net/links.html#fun

These are tiny hobby projects I've developed in the limited spare time I get. They serve as creative outlet and keep alive the fun in computing I first discovered many decades ago while learning the Logo programming language.

I'm curious to see what others here do to keep the fun in computing alive for themselves.

My son wanted to know why all planets move in one direction around the sun.

https://strangeloop.nl/max.html

I struggled a bit with finding the right way of controlling this, but with some patience you can set up a cloud of nicely rotating particles, and try to reverse the overall direction of the swirl by adding particles that rotate in the other direction.

Love this! Nice work.

Thanks! Full disclosure: by the time this was done, the actual question that prompted this was long forgotten. I got a "huh, that's nice." for my trouble (:

Definitely not as polished, but I make silly visual things from time to time and recently published my favorite ones here: https://kaeruct.github.io/gallery/

This is fun and pretty.

Boring soon.

Remember, fun comes from frustration. Keep at it

I like how this performs on my 700 euro Laptop. And it sounds cool. Well done!

Noice.

lol

Really cool. Related, I asked Claude something like "create a multimedia interactive web experience with audio and mouse interactions" a few months back and it produced something fairly similar. My favourite follow-up prompt was "Make it more Stranger Things" and it turned the background music - which it generated - into a pulsing synthwave sound.

I really need to post these art experiments as some are truly mind-blowing for a machine that can't see.

I dislike how you have directed the topic to yourself, and don't even post the thing

Sorry. You're right of course. Won't do it again.

I didn't mind it, it inspired me. I've always wanted to play with doing something like that, but I've always found it difficult to work with sound and music; and even though I use AI for tons of stuff it never occurred to me that I could also use it to help me out with that. That said, +1 to sharing a link to cool things even if they are half broken, if you think it's cool chances are someone else also will.

Here's a fun one I just made for you. Slightly inspired by OP https://claude.site/artifacts/698c26f4-2f60-428b-8ae0-ac7a29... Took about 15mins of prompting and iteration. Need to press start audio and then drag your mouse around.

The prompting is more interesting than the end result though, in my opinion.

Oh wow, I didn't know artifacts were shareable, and you can even take it to your own conversation to keep tinkering with it. I'm gonna have fun with this, thanks!

No worries as long as you respect HN guidelines which you didn’t break.

While I agree slightly, this could be just ignored if OT, I don’t feel like it needs to be downvoted to death. And to be fair, HN comments relating the article to personal experience is extremely common and a legitimate part of what HN is about. With only demo and no words in the post it’s hard not to wander, other comments here have done so. You could read the parent comment as being inspired enough to finish a latent project, which is perhaps the same feeling I get from most of the digital/generate/interactive art projects posted here: so cool it makes me want to resurrect mine. Meta topics that are interesting about that: 1- interactive art is often more fun to create than it is to use, and 2- many of us make our livings making and maintaining so much tech for our employers we run out of time to do it for ourselves. ;)

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