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by korethr 2967 days ago
The distortion sounds are being distorted on individual strings, as opposed to after summing. If you look at the credits, and follow the link to the sound sources, you can find the files used. If you listen, you'll be able to match them up. While I agree that the distortion should happen after summing, I suspect the playing and summing of individual already-distorted string sounds was done because that's what could be implemented simply and easily. Applying distortion after summing may well require more extensive coding, or stuff that's computationally intensive enough to slow down the browser (I don't know this for certain, I'm guessing).

I'm not faulting the author for this, I probably would have done the same.
1 comments
korethr 2967 days ago
Now that I type this out, I find myself curious just how much work it would take to implement a software-modelled distortion in the browser. I guess that's another entry for my list of "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if I could do $FOO" type projects.
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raphlinus 2967 days ago
Not actually that hard. You want a WaveShaperNode. Of course, tuning the curve and other parameters so it sounds _good_ is nontrivial.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WaveShaperN...

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