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Air Theremin – A browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam
- gurov 2mo agoThe camera watches your palms. Move them apart and it gets louder. Bring them together and it goes quiet. Raise them both and the note goes up. There is a sound wave strung between your hands, and it slackens as they close. Two palms give you four numbers, and one of them is best left alone. Their mean height is the pitch. The distance between them is the volume. The angle of the line joining them sat unused for months and is now the vibrato: see-saw your hands and the note begins to sing. The fourth is where the pair sits horizontally, and it stays free on purpose, so that nobody is pinned to one spot in front of the camera. Their apparent size is a fifth thing and not a position at all; it moves a lowpass and a reverb send, so leaning back makes the room bigger. The angle is independent of the distance, so the vibrato leaves the volume alone, and the string drawn between the hands is already a picture of it. It began as a phone toy — tilt left and right for volume, forward and back for pitch. The camera came later and turned out to be the better instrument. The phone mode is still there. No video leaves your machine. The hand tracking is MediaPipe's Hand Landmarker compiled to WASM, running on your own GPU. The tracker and its model are fetched once from a CDN, about 8 MB, and after that you can unplug the network and it still plays. Most of the work was not the sound. It was the hand that disappears. MediaPipe finds a palm by its plane, so it loses one when you turn your wrist edge-on, or when the room is dark and the webcam falls to fifteen frames a second and a moving hand becomes a smear. At first I held the note for a second after a hand vanished. People said it lagged. I cut it to half a second. People said the sound kept dropping out. Both were right. Now the hold depends on where the hand was last seen: near the edge of the frame a person has genuinely taken their hand away, so 400 ms; deep in frame nobody teleports and the detector merely blinked, so a full second, and no one hears the gap. The other stubborn thing was the bass. A phone speaker produces nothing below roughly 150 Hz, and raising the gain there does nothing at all — I tried ten decibels and heard silence. So the bottom octave is split off, saturated gently to breed harmonics, and its fundamental is then filtered away. The ear reconstructs a pitch it never heard. That trick then caused a bug I misread for a week. A tester said the pitch moved in steps in the phone mode, worst in the bass, and guessed it was a frame rate problem. It was not. The phone reports its tilt angle quantised to something close to a whole degree, and I had packed six octaves into eighty degrees of tilt — so one tick of the sensor was most of a semitone. It was audible in the bass specifically because of the exciter: at 70 Hz the ear resolves pitch poorly, but the exciter re-voices the note through harmonics at two and three hundred hertz, which is exactly where the ear resolves cents best. So the fix was not the sound and not the frame rate. It was a narrower range, a wider sweep, and reading the sensor at frame rate instead of once per event. One HTML file, no build step, MIT: https://github.com/gurov/theremin https://github.com/gurov/theremin
- beezlewax 2mo agoOne AI slop comment.
- Retr0id 2mo agoCool project but did you really need to use an LLM for this comment?
- Brendinooo 2mo agocomment history suggests English is not his first language, this is probably translated
- Retr0id 2mo agoTranslation does not typically produce Claude-style sentence structure and phraseology, unless the translator is also Claude.
- Brendinooo 2mo agoRight, I'm saying that I think the author asked Claude to translate notes/writing that were composed in a different language.
- gurov 2mo agoMy bad, I used Claude to create the description. The thing is, I'm really bad at presenting a project properly. But thanks for the criticism, I'll take it into account next time.
- cowboylowrez 2mo agoI think the main objection is that hacker news supposedly doesn't want AI generated comments, which is going to paradoxically produce the situation where the mods will be overwhelmed with policing AI generated comments and they themselves will be replaced by AI who will then be incentivized to accuse human comments as being AI (because they're not team AI duh) and then there will be nothing but bots here.
- aiandaguy 2mo ago[flagged]
- unified101 2mo agoNice experiment. Looks like the camera feed processing fps is sufficient for some creativity here.
- jojogeo 2mo agoI love this, but for some reason I can't find any way to turn the camera on/it only works with the mouse. Awesome toy though.
- self 2mo agoThere's a button next to "gyro" labeled "hands." Click on it, and the browser will ask for the camera permission. For me (Chrome, mac), I had to click on the "cal" button next to it the first time to actually switch to the camera.
- bigblind 2mo agoQuite fun to play with.Nice work!
- bookofjoe 2mo agoSince a physical theremin is played by non-contact gestures and motions, perhaps your creation might be more aptly termed a "Virtual theremin."
- jayknight 2mo agoI her your point, but this is the theremin version of air guitar, so I think it fits.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoErmm, theremin came first, so actually the air guitar is a theremin-version of a guitar. So actually this project should be called “Cameramin”, since it has very little do to with air guitar, other than air guitar being derived from the theremin ..
- jayknight 1mo agoTheremin was invented in 1920. I'm quite sure someone pretended to play a pretend guitar before that.
- helsinkiandrew 2mo agoAlthough its still kind of working in roughly the same manner as the original theramin - just using a different frequency of electromagnetic radiation. Perhaps a "high frequency theramin"?
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoPhotonoramin? Edit: Cameramin, obviously, d’oh.
- ben_w 2mo agoLight orchestra?
- sd9 2mo agoI’m going to get pwned one of these days, considering my threshold for giving a random website access to my webcam is apparently mild curiosity and entertainment for 30s.
- remote 2mo ago"An overdriven webcam sensor reconfigures its pixels into an AI-steered optical phased array, discharging the laptop's total electrical power as a lethal, coherent laser pulse the instant your hand moves." Then it rendered the page load with '<html><h1>"You have been theremin ated".'
- razemio 2mo agoWhat would be the attack vector with indirect access to a webcam?
- sd9 2mo agoDe-anonymisation for one. But more generally, if I’m the sort of person who would allow this I’d probably allow some other stupid permissions if they promised me something novel on the other side.
- alien_hand 2mo agoMaybe try hiding your face below the camera and throwing your hands up in the sky so the camera only sees your hands then play/sing Metallica. [Chorus] Never cared for what they do Never cared for what they know But I know [Refrain] So close, no matter how far It couldn't be much more from the heart Forever trusting who we are And nothing else matters
- rapnie 2mo agoThe general tendency among people is to go along with what's thrown to them, in a Symphony of Destruction, Megadeath [Refrain] You take a mortal man And put him in control Watch him become a God Watch people's heads a-roll A-roll A-roll [Chorus] Just like the Pied Piper Led rats through the streets We dance like marionettes Swaying to the symphony of destruction
- booi 2mo agoSay what you want about AI but it makes it possible to build a whole slew of awesome stuff
- phyzix5761 2mo agoAI is great. AI is a huge field encompassing many things that are not LLMs.
- sureMan6 2mo agoThis was built by an LLM
- phyzix5761 2mo agoAnd? I'm talking about all the other things encompassing AI and Machine Learning.
- SamBam 2mo agoThat pedantic ship has sailed. In everyday communication people use "AI" as a shorthand for saying "LLM," even if they know perfectly well that other forms of AI exist. You can tell this by context, no need to tell people that there are other kinds of AI.
- sgt 2mo agoHorrible UI's though.. just look at this. But the idea is cool.
- famahar 2mo agoYeah, it's really easy to spot an AI made app. I don't want to discount the project for being coded with AI, but you can tell when the UI is basically one shotted due to all the clutter and bloated features. I don't think AI understands that "less is more" when it comes to UI. It always seems overly eager to expose every single control and add UI flourishes to the point of being gaudy.
- ben_w 2mo agoBah, I got part way through making this as an iPhone app and this person beat me to it :P Seriously though: nicely done, UX here is better than what I came up with.
- specproc 2mo agoSo many folks in the thread, myself included. Really fun type of project.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoAn iPhone version which used both the front and rear cameras would be far cooler than this, and provide better control too. Call it Cameramin and you’ve got a customer. ;)
- jkahrs595 2mo agoBoth front/rear cameras simultaneously? How would that work? You’d either have to have it balancing upright, or hold it in your mouth or something else awkward no?
- ben_w 2mo agoPhone stands exist, and I can see a custom stand working plausibly well if this made phones replace actual theramins for performances.
- MomsAVoxell 2mo agoExactly, just 3D print a little inverted π-shaped stand, plonk the Cameramin on it, and get on with the performance. Sounds like a great app idea, no matter that someone else might’ve already done something similar. I’d love to see it personally (although I have my own theremin to play with) .. an app like this would be very fun indeed.
- dylan604 2mo ago
- fosron 2mo agoReally cool. I remember one local musician here in Lithuania used a theremin like 20 years ago and i was amazed at the interactivity and the alien sound of it. Now sitting in front of my computer doing the same that many years later brings memories back!
- thisguylikesai 2mo ago[flagged]
- samayashar 2mo agoThis is actually so cool.
- nextstep 2mo agoAiremin
- logicallee 2mo agoThis is extremely cool. I activated the camera and it recognized the position of my hands and I was able to play it as shown in the instructions. It's very fun.
- leumon 2mo agoI find it a bit suspicious that this exact hand waving data could be used to solve Google's latest reCAPTCHA: https://docs.cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/hand-gesture-verification https://docs.cloud.google.com/recaptcha/docs/hand-gesture-ve...
- jpcom 2mo ago"Play Beethoven's Fifth"
- calvinmorrison 2mo agoA surprisingly robust approach to human verification would be to abandon visual classification entirely and instead exploit culturally embedded call-and-response patterns. There are obvious concerns regarding age and demographic bias, but these could potentially be addressed through a rotating corpus of challenges. More interesting is the adversarial question: while an LLM can trivially retrieve the expected response, can it distinguish between merely knowing the response and knowing when to come in? When I say uh you say 'ah' Uh ah Uh Ah Now when i say freeze y'all stop on a tidime when I say freeze you just freeze one time when i say freeze y'all stop on a dime FREEZE Now - all the ladies in the place, if you got real hair, real fingernails, if you got a job, you going to school and yall need nobody to help you handle yo business make some noise NOOIISE So - Dr. D. J. Kool has clearly been working on this thesis for some time
- jpcom 2mo agoI found that rather entertaining, thank you. It reminds me of Rick n Morty, S01 E04, when they start rapping on stage and making more and more specific requests to get the matrix they're stuck in to glitch out.
- jpoesen 2mo agoCome on. "Thairemin" was right th(e|ai)re.
- dmd 2mo agoSimilar, my "play with your hands" one: https://3e.org/hands.html https://3e.org/hands.html
- xianshou 2mo agoReally missed the opportunity for "Airemin".
- osetinsky 2mo agothis is really cool. i especially like the gesture mapping... using the distance between your hands for volume, their average height for pitch, and the angle between them for vibrato feels unusually intuitive. the fact that those dimensions can move independently makes this feel like it could support a lot more than a theremin sound also - i made you some sounds with Underscore: chill / evolving harmonic thing: https://underscore.audio/s/cmp_f2b79a32-57e/chord_lantern https://underscore.audio/s/cmp_f2b79a32-57e/chord_lantern chaotic / glitchier thing: https://underscore.audio/s/cmp_6abde2c8-2d9/morseMind https://underscore.audio/s/cmp_6abde2c8-2d9/morseMind they're LLM-generated, web-embeddable synths, and the real-time controllable parameters can be defined in the prompt — so your hand tracking could map directly onto whatever controls make sense for the instrument you can also generate more structured compositions like this: https://underscore.audio/s/cmp_9175f7d2-fe0/drifter_glimmer https://underscore.audio/s/cmp_9175f7d2-fe0/drifter_glimmer happy to help you wire one up / iterate on some sounds if you're interested disclaimer: i'm building Underscore :)
- sd9 2mo agoWe know you’re generating comments with an LLM even when you remove capital letters. Do mention your product when it’s relevant, but just make it human, please
- hny6epwg93 2mo agoHonestly? Respect
- nickgubbins 2mo agothis is fantastic - props to the creator
- bobbiechen 2mo agoVery impressed by the responsiveness of this. But I gotta say, it's much more fun to play a physical theremin, which has slightly different controls (two antennae, one controlling volume and the other pitch). https://www.gaudi.ch/OpenTheremin/ https://www.gaudi.ch/OpenTheremin/ will run with an Arduino and it's very satisfying to get better at controlling.
- ordinarily 2mo agoFunny I put one of these on my personal site awhile ago. https://www.zchry.org/ https://www.zchry.org/ I don't think it works as well as this one.
- linesofcode 2mo agoFunny I built a very similar app just a few days ago. Cool idea! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363233 https://termenvox.vercel.app/ https://termenvox.vercel.app/ https://github.com/TimMikeladze/termenvox https://github.com/TimMikeladze/termenvox
- dash2 2mo agoIf my Jack Russell is in the right mood, I can make him growl by bringing my hands up as if to stroke him. I call this the Therrieremin.
- cochlear 2mo agoFunny, I guess this idea is in the air (har har). I've made a couple things along these lines over the past year. One is a fun, Halloween-themed toy: https://blog.cochlea.xyz/theremin.html https://blog.cochlea.xyz/theremin.html The other is a (slightly) more serious exploration of multivariate time signals as a control signal for an instrument. In the latter case, the instrument is learned/inferred from a segment of input audio: https://blog.cochlea.xyz/resonancemodel.html https://blog.cochlea.xyz/resonancemodel.html This is a really neat idea! Like others here, I'm not a huge fan of the hyper-dense and dripping-with-ai UI, though.
- specproc 2mo agoI made one of these recently! Total vibe-code, but exactly the sort of thing that I'd never get around to without. Plugged it into Sonic Pi, wired it up to play samples on gestures. Got a nice installation brewing at some point.
- tonetheman 2mo ago[dead]
- kderbyma 2mo agoSomething tells me this is all a ploy to attract great talented theremin players, ML their talents...and then sell you Air play back....on subscription of course
- functionmouse 2mo agothis is a novelty that great talented theremin players would find entertaining for 30 seconds before going back to their expensive Moog
- jpcom 2mo agoSo. F*king. Cool!
- oliwary 2mo agoCool! It's really fun what browsers can do these days in terms of real time image processing even. I made a set of games controlled by waving in front of the camera a while back at https://motionparty.net https://motionparty.net This reminds me that I should finish them!
- jamiepond 2mo agoTamber just dropped the pro version of this for your DAW. VST, AU, Standalone. https://tamber.music/lp/gestures https://tamber.music/lp/gestures
- benlindell 2mo ago[dead]
- conorcleary 2mo agoThairemin?
- NeoByte 2mo ago[flagged]
- s_Hogg 2mo agoWhat happens if you make a wanking motion
- zombot 2mo agoYou hear fap-fap-fap... Or it counts as a captcha for porn site access.
- andy_ppp 2mo agoI often think adding minority report style gestures to a laptop would be more useful than a touchscreen, maybe that’s just me…