Mini Synth and Audio Visualization

mini-projects
Published

October 30, 2024

I’ve been enjoying creating lots of little projects with Claude artifacts and other tools (post on that soon). Two especially fun ones were both audio related: a mini synth and an audio visualization widget.

The synth came up while I was messing with Google’s MusicFX DJ - a fantastic tool in it’s own right. I wanted a way to jam along, and while I have a few midi controllers I thought I’d instead whip up an in-browser synth using the computer keyboard to minimize time-to-jamming. This is the result:

synth

It’s very simple, but I do like being able to set different scales. Google’s MusicFX DJ let’s you set key too, so you can match them up and have things sound nice together. Here’s a clip of me testing this out for the first time

Noodling with the synth and Google’s MusicFX DJ

Links:

audio viz

The second project comes from my nostalgia for the old windows media player visualizations. Impressively, Claude turns out to write OK shaders! There are a few to choose from, none mind-blowing but for something visible to watch while I jam with the previous setup this was a fun way to go. Link: https://tools.johnowhitaker.com/audio_viz

Both these tools came together in under an hour, between 4pm and 5pm which is usually the dead zone where I’d done being productive work-wise and waiting for my beloved wife to get home. Each took a bit of back-and-forth to get right, but also didn’t need me to write much if any code. There’s a joy in crafting perfect software, but there’s also a joy in spontaneously bringing little things like this to life with just a bit of chatting with AI. What a time to be alive!