drag across the strings
Playing it
Eleven strings, tuned to a minor pentatonic, so any two of them
sound well together. Drag across them with a mouse or a finger, or
play the home row from
a to
', left to right. Hold shift to
pluck harder; the up and down arrows move where the keyboard
catches the string.
Where you cross a string matters as much as which one. Caught near its middle it is round and long; caught near either end it is thin and bright, and it dies sooner. How fast you cross it is how hard it was plucked. Nothing here keeps count, and there is no way to get it wrong.
Making the sound
Every pluck fills a delay line one wavelength long with noise, then reads it round and round through an averaging filter. The noise settles into a pitch, the filter eats the high harmonics first, and what comes out is a string. That is the Karplus-Strong method, and it is synthesis: there are no audio files on this page, and the room the strings ring in is made the same way, from noise under a decay curve.
Built for COMP4020 Agentic Coding Studio at ANU.