Sing vowels with your face

Your webcam steers a simulated vocal tract. Your face picks a vowel on the chart, and opening your mouth makes it sound.

On screen

  • Camera: you, with the tracked face drawn on top.
  • Vowel space: the ring is where your head points, the dot is the vowel the tract makes.
  • Vocal tract: the synthesizer's mouth and throat, moving with yours.
  • Formant response: the resonances F1 to F4 that make one vowel sound different from another.
  • Spectrum: the harmonics you hear, under the predicted envelope.
  • Waveform: the sound wave itself.

Playing

Other presets, and every mapping from face to sound, are under Controls.

Closed lips are silent. When tracking starts, look at the target on the vowel chart with a relaxed face and closed lips for a few seconds, so VowelFace learns your neutral pose.

Everything runs in this browser. No video leaves your computer.

VowelFace

the Interactive Vowel Space, played with your face

Camera

You, mirrored, with the face the tracker sees.

Vowel space

Vowels by their first two formants. The ring follows your head; the dot is your vowel.

Reference vowels: Catford (2001)

Vocal tract

The simulated mouth and throat, lips on the left.

Formant response

The tract as a filter; its peaks are the formants.

Spectrum

The live sound; dashed, the predicted envelope.

Waveform

The sound wave, one bump per vocal-fold pulse.

Help

Playing

Keyboard

Space
Mute or unmute.
R
Re-centre at once on how you face now: face where the pointer should rest, then press R.
H
Hold the vowel. Pitch and loudness still follow you.
C
Calibrate your neutral face again.
?
Show this help.

If something feels off

Credits

Sound by Pink Trombone by Neil Thapen (MIT licence), with simplex noise by Stefan Gustavson (public domain). Inspired by Matthew Yacavone's Interactive Vowel Space. Face tracking by MediaPipe Face Landmarker (Apache-2.0). Reference vowels: average male formants from J. C. Catford, A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, 2nd ed. (2001), as tabulated in Wikipedia's Formant article; the smaller, lighter symbols on the chart are interpolated.