About Wordsynth
What it is
Wordsynth turns one word into a full day of original synthwave. Type a word, press Tune in, and you hear a track built from it. The music follows the clock in UTC, so everyone listening to the same word at the same moment hears the same thing, and the word becomes a little shared radio station.
How a word becomes music
The short version is below. How it works has the technical version, the history and the patch notes.
Every word gets three ratings, each from −10 to 10:
- Temperature is how hot or cold the word feels. Cold words play slow and icy, hot words fast and molten.
- Brightness is how bright or dark it is. Bright words lean toward a major key, dark words toward a minor one.
- Weight is how big it is. Tiny words sound plucky and light, heavy words sound deep and wide.
The same ratings tint the colors on the page, make hot words throw sparks and cold words snow, and decide how hard heavy words thump on the beat.
Where the ratings come from
About two thousand words were rated by hand for this project. Every other word is estimated: Wordsynth finds the hand-rated words that mean something similar and blends in published research on how words feel and how big they are. A word it has never seen is read by the sounds of its letters. The ratings are a best guess, so some words will feel off.
Data credits
Wordsynth’s ratings build on the following open research data. Thank you to the people who made it.
- Glasgow Norms: Scott, Keitel, Becirspahic, Yao and Sereno (2019), Behavior Research Methods. CC BY 4.0
- Warriner, Kuperman and Brysbaert word ratings: (2013), Behavior Research Methods. CC BY 4.0
- Concreteness ratings: Brysbaert, Warriner and Kuperman (2014). CC BY 4.0
- Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms: Lynott, Connell, Brysbaert, Brand and Carney (2020). CC BY 4.0
- VADER sentiment lexicon: Hutto and Gilbert (2014). MIT
- GloVe word vectors: Pennington, Socher and Manning (2014), Stanford NLP. Public domain
Contact
Feedback, a word that sounds wrong, or anything else: blinkerbuilds21@gmail.com