Show HN: Sirenfall, a civil defense siren synthesized in Web Audio
sirenfall.liveI built a cool browser scene, a shelter window over a dystopian city in the rain. Pull the breaker and a siren tower spins up. The wind-down is super unsettling and I love it.
The siren is not a recording. Two port rings make a 5:6 dual tone, 515 and 618 Hz. The horn turns at 4 RPM and everything (loudness, brightness, doppler and stereo position) follows the horn angle you can see on the tower. Rain and thunder are the only recordings.
Build it yourself, source is one HTML file and MIT: https://github.com/beeswaxpat/sirenfall
How it works: https://sirenfall.live/how-it-works
Press F for fullscreen, S to save a picture. Landscape on phones. No cookies, no personal data, the only request besides audio is an anonymous page-count pixel.
Appreciate any feedback and shoutout to the siren community!
The orginal air raid sirens were mechanical so maybe you want to emulate the spinning metal parts as part of the sound generator. The siren will have an inertia and load to spinning up and spinning down to it because the sound generator is mechanical. then mechanical wobble on the parts would probably introduce distortion.
It doesn't sound realistic. Needs much more distortion. The wave is too clean, as if those had Hi-Fi speakers, which, of course, they don't.