Show HN: High-quality duck audio synthesizer
- ID
- 36877
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 17 Oct 2026, 9:28 PM
- Fetched
- 19 Oct 2026, 10:08 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://celphase.github.io/duck-pond/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 3.5
- Created
- 19 Oct 2026, 10:08 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
A Show HN side project called "The Duck Pond" renders a small flock of mallards — three hens, two drakes and two broods of ducklings — in the browser, where every quack is synthesized live rather than played from recordings. You stand on a bank and hear the birds positioned in space, with distance rings marked at 5, 10, 20 and 40 m, and a headphone toggle plus keyboard controls (p for peas, h for headphones, space to pause). The thread drew 169 points and 43 comments.
Why it matters
There is no product, price, or API here, so nothing to adopt or migrate. Its only practical value is as a small worked example of browser-based positional audio and procedural synthesis — useful if you are prototyping spatial sound with the Web Audio API and want to see how a headphone-gated experience is handled. For anyone not doing audio work, it is a weekend curiosity, not a signal about tooling or the market.
Discussion angle
Procedural synthesis versus sampled audio: the claim is 'no recordings' — open the page live and ask whether the synthesized quacks and the 5/10/20/40 m distance cues actually read as a convincing space, and where the illusion breaks.