swood

March 21st, 2016 (8th grade)

To put it succinctly¹, swood lets you turn this:

…into this:

More technically, swood is a command-line sample-based software synthesizer (though not without custom hardware to match). As described on its homepage:

swood (or swood.exe) is a program for automatically tuning audio samples to different frequencies. It works as a MIDI synthesizer, which can be used to process audio in realtime (like the Casio SK-5) or convert MIDIs directly into WAV files.

One could use this for real music, but the main purpose is for meme remixes like Robotniktrousle or ECCH by Glamour. In the past, this has been done by extracting sound clips from obscure terrible animated movies/TV shows/YouTube videos (like Hotel Mario) and painstakingly rearranging them one-by-one in a video editor. This is hard work! Where swood comes in is by taking in the video clips and a MIDI and spitting out zero-effort mememixes.

While testing swood I created a SoundCloud account where I dumped my tests. Each and every song on it was created with no more than swood and sometimes Audacity, and all were created in less than five minutes.

I had a prototype of swood working in less than a day with barely 100 lines of code; the current version has thousands of lines of code, is an order of magnitude faster, and took more than six months of work (counting the hardware).

swood was one of the first “real” applications I had developed from scratch, tested, documented, packaged, released, maintained, and updated. To this day I find despite its silliness it’s one of the most useful tools I have ever made. I have probably used swood for at least ten separate audiovisual projects.

After I created swood I wanted to show it off at Maker Faire, but being software there was nothing to show! That’s why I made a custom physical synthesizer powered by swood.