Show HN: Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker

visualnoise.ca

39 pointstevans313 comments

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. :)

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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.

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?

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

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.

What is the LICENSE?

Just added it here: https://github.com/tevans-3/synesthesia/blob/main/LICENSE

I love the anti-licence and thank you for the blessings!

I actually found that in SQLite's source code! I love it too.

synthesia

oh my god, so LOUD lol - i didn't read the post just clicked the link LMAO

I'm sorry!

I know this doesn't help you now, but I changed the default volume to be significantly lower...

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

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...

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