kazinator 16 days ago

The remote possibilities here are staggering. If we could send beeps in the human vocal range over phone lines to control things, it could revolutionize telephony!

AlecSchueler 16 days ago

Very cool but you wouldn't get very far in an FPS by sending one event at a time. This way you can't did things like strafe turning or shoot while walking.

A flute normally has about 2 octaves of diatonic notes, certainly true for a recorder. I'd suggest expanding the number of usable notes so that some could be used for compound commands.

In saying that, what would be even better, would be to allow the use multiple notes at ones, polyphonic instruments, so that chords could be used for this effect. Say you play a C to walk forwards, a G to strafe right, and E to shoot, then a C major triad could be played to do all these things simultaneously. A flute quartet could maybe play the game together.

  • praash 15 days ago

    Maybe the flute's pitch could be decoded back into the required fingering combination. This way the player could treat each hole as an individual button. The actual notes might not all sound musical (or be properly distinguishable).

    • AlecSchueler 15 days ago

      That's a cool idea but subtlety of those differences would be much, much more complex to pick up and everything would certainly need to be recalibrated for every different model of flute whereas the current solution would work for flute tuned A=440Hz

adybray2 16 days ago

Why is this not called PiedPiper?!?!

foreigner 16 days ago

Does it work with whistling? You could control your mouse like that character from Guardians of the Galaxy!

  • Syntonicles 16 days ago

    Yes, I made a game that you controlled by whistling, back in 2018 with the WebAudio API.

    My version of the cursor kept a continuous scan velocity horizontally across the screen, and you controlled the y-axis via pitch. Button presses were (intentional) collisions.

  • pants2 16 days ago

    I made a game like this the other day just for fun! It worked pretty well but it's more of a novelty and not really fun to whistle for more than 30s.

foreigner 16 days ago

It's like a reverse Theremin

MichaelMug 16 days ago

Instant thought: forte and fortissimo increase velocity or maybe specific chords.

addled 16 days ago

How long until someone speed runs Ocarina of Time on an ocarina?

Euphorbium 16 days ago

It would be great if it could subtract the music that is playing.

lll-o-lll 16 days ago

Need to add the ability to control acceleration with volume.

squarefoot 16 days ago

I would use that with a drawing software to turn any shittyflute tune into a piece of art.

wesamco 16 days ago

This is the future!

  :)
carlsverre 16 days ago

This is hilarious. Reminds me of the YID (yelling input device) I made for the stupid shit hackathon in 2018[1]. Playing with alternative ways to control systems is a fun exercise in creativity.

[1]: https://github.com/carlsverre/yid

  • kaycebasques 16 days ago

    Who do I need to annoy to make another Stupid Shit Hackathon happen??

rcarmo 16 days ago

HN never disappoints on weekends. I especially liked the sharper note to click the mouse button.