Whistle Synth Mac App

(jefftk.com)

49 points | by luu 3 days ago

7 comments

  • azornathogron 3 hours ago
    Sounds a bit like imitone https://imitone.com/ (I have no affiliation)

    FYI, Imitone has a patent, I don't know what it covers or claims though.

    • jefftk 2 hours ago
      The relevant patent is from 1986, long expired: https://www.jefftk.com/p/ugo-contis-whistle-controlled-synth...
      • joemi 1 hour ago
        In case you haven't seen it, Imitone's patent is US20170098112A1 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170098112A1/en). This one's from 2017 and is still active, and it's for a periodicity analysis system. Hopefully it's not directly relevant to your synth.
        • jefftk 1 hour ago
          That patent is about a particular way of implementing a low-latency pitch tracking algorithm. My tool uses a different pitch tracking algorithm based on zero crossings. It's much simpler and far from novel.

          A big difference is that Imitone works well with singing, whereas my algorithm only does a good job with whistling. On the other hand, my algorithm is lower latency when given a whistle as input.

  • cousin_it 4 hours ago
    The first time I saw it, I thought about playing a drumkit and whistling a bassline at the same time, with someone else on guitar and vocals, making a full rock sound with two people. But then I was too lazy to try it.
    • embedding-shape 3 hours ago
      There been some people doing the whole "one man band" thing with a back pack drum, guitar and harmonica. I bet someone crazy enough could do one instrument per limb + harmonica and maybe even a theremin with some remaining appendage too.
  • admash 2 hours ago
    How feasible would it be to add MIDI out support to this?

    I often find my improvised melodies are more interesting when I whistle them, so this would be a handy feature.

    • jefftk 1 hour ago
      I wouldn't expect MIDI to be a good fit, and when I experimented with it a few years ago I wasn't able to get anything I liked. Pitch and volume are continuous, and while this can be encoded in MIDI it's awkward. If you send too many updates you can overwhelm the synth, and if you slide a single note too far it will re-trigger the note. Also when the sound starts you know "there's whistling" before you have a great estimate of the pitch, but MIDI wants to know the initial tone (and many voices have tuned onsets).

      But if you want to try it, checking out https://github.com/jeffkaufman/whistle-synth and asking Claude or Codex to add MIDI support would probably work!

  • n738 4 hours ago
    This is something I think about making every time I sit in front of my PC - thank you and I look forward to trying it!
  • comradesmith 3 days ago
    It seems like it will be fun but my headphones just come in under the activation threshold, but I can't see a way to add some input gain
    • jefftk 4 hours ago
      Try setting the gate to a higher number?
  • mattmar96 4 hours ago
    Sweet!
  • markking 4 hours ago
    [dead]