Less Talk

▶ Play it (best with headphones)

An original big-beat homage in Web Audio, after "A Little Less Conversation" (Elvis Presley, JXL remix, 2002).

Two synthesized voices keep chattering in speech bubbles. A band keeps arriving: kick, snare and hats, a wah guitar, a Hammond-ish organ, a bass, a brass section. Each section gives the talkers less room, through a build, a held breath and a drop, until the brass shuts them down and does the arguing instead.

Nothing comes from the record: no words, no melody, no riff. The harmony (a D dorian vamp with a bluesy turnaround) and the horn lines are original. What it borrows is the attitude, written as a program.

How it's made

• One HTML file, no libraries, no build. Open index.html and press Play.
• Everything is synthesized with the Web Audio API: oscillators, noise, filters and envelopes, with a convolution reverb, a dotted-eighth delay and a soft-clip master bus.
• The talkers are formant voices: a buzzing source pushed through three moving bandpass filters, narrowed to a telephone band.
• The score reads like a score: drum patterns are 16-step strings, the horn lines are note lists, and the arrangement is a table of sections that sets how much talk and how much action each one gets.
• The picture follows the sound: the master waveform, rings on the kick, brass blasts by pitch, and speech bubbles that pop when the drop lands.

More from DOSAYGO STUDIO

• HackerBook: Hacker News, offline, in your browser
• rain: a fast hash function in under 140 lines
• prime-news: HN, but only the prime-numbered items
• HN front page 2035: the front page, reimagined
• How Much Did It Cost?: an AI build estimator for GitHub repos
• BrowserBox: remote browser isolation

License

MIT. See LICENSE.