Tone Code – It’s like morse code, but musical

I have random ideas a lot. The other day I thought, “What if there was a new audio language like morse code, but it’s musical?” So you can play any text and over time you could memorize how certain words/phrases sound. In other words, over time you’d start to remember what “hello” sounds like.

There are all kinds of ways to do this but I quickly settled on using the C major scale. Each letter is a different note in the scale. Since I don’t want notes to get too ear piercingly high, V through Z go back to lower tones but doubled up.

Pacing punctuation like a comma or semi-colon pause/slow down the play back. Periods are like a bass drum kick, question marks bend up, and exclamation points pulse three times quickly.

I’m using Gibberish.js by Charlie Roberts for the tones.

Here’s an example of what “Hello, how are you?” sounds like.

It will always sound like this if it’s “Tone Code.” So, now you’ll remember that in “Tone Code” this is someone saying, “Hello, how are you?”

I also made a little social feed. Here you can post, comment, and get the embed code for posts. Although, the embed code will only work on websites that will run JavaScript. So, the embeds will work on your own personal website, but not in a social media post.

Emoji make sounds too! Here’s a key so you can listen to each letter and a few emoji.

You can add Tone Code to any element at your own website. Please link back to my website to give me some credit and credit Charlie Roberts, the creator of Gibberish.js.

Download zip.

Extract and include folder/all files on your server.

Use like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/tc-lib/tone-code-library.css">

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/charlieroberts/Gibberish@master/build/gibberish.min.js"></script>
<script src="/tc-lib/tone-code-mapping.js"></script>
<script src="/tc-lib/tone-code-synth.js"></script>
<script src="/tc-lib/tone-code-library.js"></script>
<script>
  ToneCodeLibrary.init({
    selector: '.tone-code-playable',
    ariaLabel: 'Play Tone Code'
  });
</script>

If you have any suggestions let me know in the comments.