Each letter is assigned to a note and then it plays it as you type

You can also change the kind of noise that plays when you type.

There's this bouncy bleepy sound, a glockenspiel, and this spooooky synth pad.

That's a pretty cool musical dong, and I really do love musical dongs.

They're so fun you can make some sweet, sick beats. Which we're gonna do today

with some things you can do online now guys.

Listen to this.

Does that sound out of tune to you?

Well if you said yes, then you're wrong.

Tuning is a lie.

We talked a little bit about this in the video “Can You Hear Me?” but the way we hear

notes and the differences between them is traditionally based on simple mathematical

ratios.

The whole idea of things being “in tune” the way we think of it is pretty recent.

Even a few hundred years ago, everything was tuned totally differently, being based on

relating everything back to the overtone series, which describes how every note we hear is

one fundamental note with a bunch of other notes stacked on top of it.

If you want to play around with notes just as intervals ratios of frequencies, this website

has a fun colorful honeycomb design and can make some truly awful noises if you're not

careful.

Click the arrow on the left to change the notes on the keyboard and also the instrument.

Some of these tunings are hundreds of years old, while other ones were designed for the

website, but all of them are about balancing our subjective, cultural perception of notes

with the mathematical reality of frequencies.

Our modern system of tuning, called equal temperament, is only about 200 years old.

It's also based on ratios but their based on the irrational interval of the twelfth

root of two, which is great for making sure every note is exactly the same length apart,

but it does some weird stuff to the way we perceive notes.

More info on that in the description.

Speaking of math and music, one of my favorite pieces of musical technology is the vocoder,

which makes you sound like a robot.

Vocoders are pretty old, being developed by Bell Labs (the guys who made the telephone)

in the 20s and 30s, and they were originally designed to encode vocal messages for american

submarines.

Going back to the overtone series, if you look at the human voice it ranges through

a large amount of overtones.

When talking about voice these overtones are called “Formants.”

What the vocoder does is separate the sound it gets into separate sections, or “bands”

of frequencies.

For example the Eeeee sound has many more upper harmonics than the Oooh sound.

What the vocoder does next is measure the volume of those different frequency bands

in different parts of speech.

Then, using a “carrier wave,” like static or a sawtooth wave, the volume of the upper

harmonics is changed to match the amplitude of those harmonics in the original recording.

And also for no reason whatsoever

if you want to listen to this entire video with my voice going through a vocoder.

you can click. link right here or there will be a link in the description

cuz why nowt?

So the vocoder is a pretty cool instrument, but what's the oldest instrument in the

world?

Well there's a lot of theories, but the most likely candidate is a bone flute that's

about 40,000 years old. About as old as Michael Stevens

It was discovered in central europe, and it's made of bird bones.

Unfortunately, the real one is too old to play, but at a state of play dot com you can

take a look at a hundred other instruments from around the world.

There's everything from electric guitars to the xun

There's also an instrument called the harmonica. I don't know why we would harm

Monica, but it does seem like a pretty cool instrument.

There's also an ocarina in here, so if you really want to relive ocarina of time, you can.

Each block also tells you what type of instrument each one is, as well as the typical note ranges

and if it's in a classical orchestra. Spoiler alert, the ocarina is not

Once you've explored all of those cool instruments, there's some more cool web instruments

for us to check out, like musical squares, which lets you sequence a chimy lil soundscape.

Here's another one: Launchpad arcade.

Use your keyboard to play some music and drop some phat beats yo.

Look at this. Look what I can do. Hold on

Wait there's more! Hold on Hannah.

Wait, it's gonna change it up a little bit!

So anyway.

Launchpad is my personal favorite, but jack seems to really like patatatap. Patatap.

It's like typatone. You can use your text and it makes noises.

Ehhhhhh but launchpad's the best one. Do that. Make some tunes

Share em specifically with Jack. Oh yeah, Jack's email is-

I won't give em your email. But I'll give you a hint.

It rhymes with whack at see sauce dot lawm.

And that's really all I got for ya.

Oh no wait that's a lie. Links to the dongs in the description.

Playlist of dongs right over here

Again: there's this episode if you for some reason want to watch it again as a vocoder robot voice.

And that's about it. Wash behind your ears, love yourself, email jack

Tell him that he's great. Again, it rhymes with lack at see sauce dot lawm. Hopefully you can figure that out.

I believe in you and as always

Thanks for watching.