The fine folks at Midnight Research Labs have put together a new toy for you to play with. It’s a Python script that makes your WiFi hardware behave more like a theremin. Based on the pyaudio library it monitors the signal strength of the AP you’re connected to and changes the tone accordingly. There’s a sample embedded above (direct link). If you have a second interface, you can use it to modulate the volume. It’s an interesting trick, but they say that there’s enough latency that it would be hard to play actual music with it.
9 thoughts on “WiFi Theremin”
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Musically, I’d say lame. As for the cool factor, to the max. This would be fun to use for checking wifi strength or while wardriving.
Dish satellite receivers have had this feature for a while, though this version looks much nicer. :-)
Sounds Like something of Wall-e … :)
Here something similar is done with ultrasone sound, too bad I don’t understand enough of this puredata to get things to work myself… :(
Dang, I forgot to include the url in my previous post, it’s at :
zevv.nl/play/code/ultrasonic-theremin/
Cool! just misses the typical sound that i relate to a theremin (as played on the linked webpage).
haha yeah it definitely sounds like wall-e
@tikimexican:
give netstumbler a try, at least it sounds like some horror movie soundtrack.
i also use it to make people laugh while checking for wifi signals at their house.
Seems this would work better if you did it with the RSSI level from a Bluetooth device. Since the range is so low it should react faster to changes in distance. On my machine, moving my phone even a few inches is usually enough for it to tick over to the next signal level.