RoomTone is live to demo at
RoomTone.xyz.
Sounds define how a place feels. The noises around us are distinct and disconnected, and rarely fit together neatly.
At their core, all ambient noises contain musical notes. Workplaces click clack in D. Engines rumble in G flat and traffic is perforated with the Fs of a honk.
Washing machines drone at A, and a microwave hums along at E flat. RoomTone breaks down a soundscape into its frequency components, and identifies a single note that sits at the middle and brings them together into a unified chord.
RoomTone removes only dissonance from a soundscape, negating unpleasant noises while preserving our environment. Dissonant sounds are salient and hard to ignore; they produce a sense of unease or tension. Like a composer reinterpreting an existing piece of music, RoomTone rearranges the content of a soundscape, so the jarring dissonant sounds fade away.
The project stemmed from a curiosity about how sensory inputs alter perceptions of our environment, and how they could be manipulated. RoomTone was shaped by conversations with psychoacousticians, composers, anthropologists, and psychologists and informed by study of many field recordings of daily life:
the sounds of appliances, traffic, and household tasks. Recordings were analyzed for their dominant tones, and the typical frequency range of common disturbing sounds was identified.
RoomTone genrates sounds with a custom synth engine. The order of events within the signal processing logic is mapped above.
RoomTone is a part of the soundscape, and it can be embedded in a hardware artifact. Hardware helps distribute the output sound across a room, so it feels connected to a space rather than like a layer on top.