{Tune In, Tune Out}

For the final of Mash-up class, Jeff Ong and I teamed up and made “Tune In, Tune Out”. It’s a webite uses your computer’s on-board microphone, listens to the surrounding environmental sound, and translates it into a musical landscape.

An accompanying visualization appears on-screen, along with options to change the musical fundamentals (key, scale, mode) of the sounds. Build with Web Audio API and Tone.js for audio, and Three.js for visual.

We started idea of filtering out the “sound of the sound”. So much effort and energy has gone into our attempts to “escape” our immediate sonic environment: conversations, distracting noises, and try to drown out the surrounding chaos.

There’s no denying the need to focus, and there’s also no shortage of aural distractions, especially living in urban areas. “Tune In, Tune Out” offers an alternative to the music and tools we use to tune out the noise around us, channeling that very noise into a sonic landscape.

An additional project inspiration and goal is to build some basic tools around making it easier to use music theory concepts in tandem with data representation. There are different types of Key, Mode, Scale, and Sound Wave to choose from. Thank Aaron Arntz for the music theory Fly by!

GitHub here.