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  Rendering wave forms for spoken text

The Sound of Waves

Why

I'm interested in how different authors sound. Why does Hemmingway sound different from Faulkner? What makes them sound different I wanted a tool to help me explore the rhythm of a text, so I built this app.

The Title

The title comes from one of my favorite books, Yushio Mishima's Sound of Waves, a book with beautiful rhythms.

What

An app that converts text-to-speech, and then renders the waveforms of the rendered speech.

How

It uses:

1. http://www.masswerk.at/mespeak/ to convert text to speech audio.
2. https://wavesurfer-js.org/ to render the audio as a waveform.

Thoughts

The relationship between written and spoken text is complex. When we read text, we see word boundaries and whitespace. But when we hear text, there are actually very few pauses in the sound.

Built With

• mespeak.js
• webaudio
• wavesurfer.js
• javascript