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Draw waveforms and hear them
Posted 17 years ago
A while back I thought it would be interesting to be able to draw arbitrary waveforms and then listen to how they sound. I had an audio engine just laying around, so I whipped up a quick application to do that.
download WaveStudio.exe
Results
In theory, you can make any sound that you want. The results aren't very interesting. You can draw a sine wave and it sounds muffled. Add some jagged edges and the sound starts to sound more raw and high pitched. But it's okay to demonstrate what a sawtooth vs. sine vs. square wave sound like.
Future work
It would be a better to be able to draw in the time vs. frequency domain, using standard brush painting tools. Thay way you could come up with more interesting waveforms.
An instant rhyming dictionary for any web site
Sometimes your API has to be simple enough for non-technical people to use it. Find out how to include a rhyming dictionary on your web page just by copying and pasting.
The Curious Complexity of Being Turned On
In software, the simplest things can turn into a nightmare, especially at a large company.
Building a better rhyming dictionary
Back in 2007, I created a
rhyming engine based on the public domain
Moby pronouncing dictionary. It simply reads the dictionary and looks for rhyming words by comparing the suffix of the words' pronunciations. Since that time, I have made some improvements.
A Rhyming Engine
Here's a rhyming engine, written in 1000 lines of C++ code. It uses the freely available Moby dictionary, and full source code is provided.
UMA and free long distance
What's to stop me from travelling to another continent, and then making free long distance calls to local numbers back home? Technically, nothing.
Let's read a Truetype font file from scratch
Walkthough of reading and interpretting a TrueType font file in a few lines of Javascript.
0, 1, Many, a Zillion
It's common wisdom that there should only be three numbers in source code. But there's actually four. Here's why.