Beat(the)Box

Inspiration

Being a drummer sucks. You have to lug your drumset everywhere, and electric drumsets are not much better. Plus drums are freakin' expensive. The only solution would be if you had a drumset at your fingertips all the time.

Sure, beatboxing is great, but chances are you suck at it. Unless, there was a program to fix this all...

What it does

Beat(the)Box can turn real life boxes into real life drums, and it can make your beatboxing pretty cool. All you need is something bassy when you hit it, and something trebly. This program does not convert to drums in real time, that would be a cool feature in the future.

How I built it

Python, the ultimate hackathon language.

Challenges I ran into

Well, it turns out accessing your microphone is not always as easy as you would think. Especially when your computer has one built in. Also, percussive sound waves carry less information than melodic sound waves. This makes analyzing them very difficult.

Also, my team did not show up, so I did this hackathon flying solo.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It actually works! At least with a bass drum and snare drum. As long as you have different-ish sounds, you can do a simple bass/snare drum beat.

What I learned

Don't go alone at a hackathon if you don't have to. Use the team building to find one. Also, a little sleep goes a long way.

What's next for Beat(the)Box

It would be nice to add real-time conversion to drums. This is possible but very difficult. Also maybe more analysis to differentiate more drums. Maybe some day i will beatbox to neil peart.

Built With

• cool-math
• librosa
• python