Code Golf is the art/science of creating wonderful little demos in an artificially constrained environment. This year the js1024 competition was looking for entries with the theme of "Creepy".
I am not a serious bit-twiddler. I can't create JS shaders which produce intricate 3D worlds in a scrap of code. But I can use slightly obscure JavaScript APIs!
There's something deliciously creepy about Numbers Stations - the weird radio frequencies which broadcast seemingly random numbers and words. Are they spies communicating? Commands for nuclear missiles? Long range radio propagation tests? Who knows!
So I decided to build one. Play with the demo.
Obviously, even the most extreme opus compression can't fit much audio into 1KB. Luckily, JavaScript has you covered! Most modern browsers have a built-in Text-To-Speech (TTS) API.
Here's the most basic example:
JavaScript m = new SpeechSynthesisUtterance; m. text = "Hello" ; speechSynthesis. speak (m);
Run that JS and your computer will speak to you!
In order to make it creepy, I played about with the rate (how fast or slow it speaks) and the pitch (how high or low).
JavaScript m. rate = Math . random (); m. pitch = Math . random ()*2;
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