Blog posts

2022

How does the Pink Trombone work?

6 minute read

Published:

The Pink Trombone is a fun, interactive vocal synthesizer written entirely with JavaScript and the Web Audio API. There are no samples involved – all of the sound is generated from scratch in less than 700 lines of code, excluding the user interface. Amazingly, that is enough to synthesize intelligible vowels and consonants, and to control the intensity, pitch, and breathiness of the voice. What exactly is going on inside there? In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the concepts that make the Pink Trombone work, and how they’re related to the actual process of human voice production.