Draw waveforms and hear them
Posted 18 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
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.
Steve Hanov makes a living working on
Rhymebrain.com,
rapt.ink,
www.websequencediagrams.com,
and Zwibbler.com. He lives in
Waterloo, Canada.
Post comment
edit
coolkase.dev
two months ago
I know that this probably won't be updated (just by looking at the Windows XP window) but could you add a feature to pick which speaker to play out of? I'm unable to hear anything.
edit
coolkase.dev
two months ago
I know that this probably won't be updated (just by looking at the Windows XP window) but could you add a feature to pick which speaker to play out of? I'm unable to hear anything.
edit
krys
one year ago
Very fun, just what I wanted since I was, like, 10. I'm 12 as of 2024. Thx!!!
It's a little too loud, but other than that, great job!
(I just realized this post was literally 4 years older than me)
edit
ProDigit
five years ago
Nice!
It's very hard to get a good timbre out of these basic sounds.
It would be nice to have the sound pulse (attack, and lower volume sustain), and select between pingpong or looping the sustain part.
I would love to see a similar program, that allows for more timbre. I wouldn't know how to implement it though...
edit
Jaïr
five years ago
Really interesting! Would love to see a drawing feature, or have this turned into a phone application. Very useful for learning purposes.
edit
zelukai
seven years ago
umm when I click "new" it doesn't do anything, the only other option is a sawtooth, and then I have to put all of the points on the left side and copy them a bunch to actually make a customized waveform... is this normal? Kevin's recommendation is pretty good too.
edit
Kevin
14 years ago
If you could turn that into an iPad app, with frequency controls, volume controls and a few basic effects like reverb/flange that would kick ass!
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.