Show HN: High-quality duck audio synthesizer

Posted by celphase 5 days ago

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Comments

Comment by codeulike 4 days ago

I like the simulation. They do 'dabbling' and 'picking insects' but they dont ever seem to do 'ducking' (tail up, head underwater).

Ducks are named after 'ducking' ... or possibly, 'ducking' is named after Ducks.

edit: also please remove hard ceiling of 120 peas. I want to throw more peas

Comment by andai 4 days ago

Duik means "dive" in Dutch, never noticed that similarity before. Maybe Ducking and Duiken both come from the bird?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/duck#etymonline_v_15956

Unrelated but amusing to me: Patak is duck in Croatian, while Batak is "bird" in Sanskrit (but means chicken leg in Croatian).

Comment by SurfingAlpaca 6 hours ago

Batak is duck in Hindi. The word comes from Persian. In Sanskrit the word for bird is pakshi

Comment by ErroneousBosh 4 days ago

Also "dook" in Scots.

Another one, in Scots you hear the word "stoor" used for dust, and "sook" for suck. And guess what, in Dutch, they call it a "stoorzuiger" pronounced like "stoor sooker"... :-D

If you speak Scots but you're in Holland or Germany and you want to order more beer, you just say "mair beer!" and it works out the same in the other two languages. This of course works if you speak German or Dutch, and you're in Scotland.

Comment by dvh 4 days ago

I don't know who came up with idea that bread is bad for ducks but it ruined one fishing spot for me. There was a place where people were feeding bread to sucks and fly fishing there was awesome. Carps, chubs, crucians, rudds and roaches, even nases! All on dry flies. Then someone put out sign that bread harms ducks so people stopped feeding them and after a while all fish just disappeared.

Comment by stevage 4 days ago

The strangest thing axout your post is the lack of curiosity about whether or not bread is, in fact, bad for ducks.

Comment by dvh 3 days ago

Why would I, I wasn't feeding them. Besides it's illegal to chum on trout lakes.

Comment by Wolfenstein98k 3 days ago

Because surely it changes how you feel if the bread was disabling ducks, rather than just innocently feeding them with no downsides.

Comment by x______________ 4 days ago

> I don't know who came up with idea that bread is bad for ducks but it ruined one fishing spot for me. There was a place where people were feeding bread to sucks and fly fishing there was awesome. Carps, chubs, crucians, rudds and roaches, even nases! All on dry flies. Then someone put out sign that bread harms ducks so people stopped feeding them and after a while all fish just disappeared.

I walk by this business every few days, it's always full of people there. People are happy, in groups and alone, all doing this act of eating.. Not a single problem in sight.

This is a McDonald's restaurant.

Does that mean McDonald's is healthy and good for people?

(..maybe we humans need more signs... )

Comment by vinckr 4 days ago

several reasons why its bad.

- Bread doesn't have much nutritional value (especially the kind of white "bread" that is common in the US for example)

- It fills up their stomach fast so they don't forage for foods they would naturally eat

- Throwing bread at one place can lead to overcrowding (which is what happened in your great fishing spot) which stresses the animals

- They also shit a lot in one place, which leads to a bunch of problems

- Uneaten bread causes algae growth which leads to diseases and pests

best to feed them peas like in this neat app or I also heard that cut up frozen grapes are a good choice.

Comment by Wowfunhappy 4 days ago

I can see how peas might solve the first and last problems on your list, but wouldn't the others remain?

Comment by vinckr 4 days ago

That is fair yea. I reckon that's why many parks put up signs to not feed the birds.

I guess if you are serious about it you can spread it out and drop your peas in different areas and/or don't drop a huge amount at once.

Comment by Caracas288 4 days ago

Lettuce and oats are some other foods.

The overcrowding can also allow bird flu to spread more easily.

Comment by tamimio 4 days ago

You can buy wild birds seeds from your local pet store and feed them.

Comment by dtgriscom 4 days ago

I have a vivid memory of camp (8 years old?) where the counselor took us to a pond and we went fishing using bread for bait. Instead of fish, we caught ducks. Not good.

Comment by RonanSoleste 4 days ago

Its still bad for them.

Comment by Wolfenstein98k 3 days ago

Probably the numerous people who noted that bread disables ducks and is very bad ecologically.

Comment by luipugs 4 days ago

This is triggering my anatidaephobia.

Comment by froh 4 days ago

TIL https://phobia.fandom.com/wiki/Anatidaephobia

thank you :-)

Comment by HoldOnAMinute 4 days ago

It doesn't fool Merlin Bird ID app on my iPhone

Comment by brainless 4 days ago

This is lovely. Tried on speaker, will try with headphones.

I have a chicken farm (and a pig farm but I manage the chickens myself). I want to start a duck farm with a fish pond. Living in a small village and enjoying these things in real life actually changed my life in ways that I cannot explain.

I still (get agents to) write software but my daily life is around the farm and village life (mostly a Sun centric routine). I have to share a bunch of photos, not doing that enough. And I want to record all the bird sounds. Perhaps host a livestream. I live here; the home stay is by the host family: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TEUSdwvko2DRWmou5

Comment by zaxxon41 1 day ago

I didn't know I needed a duck call simulator, but apparently I did.

Comment by whartung 4 days ago

This is beautiful.

We used to feed the ducks at the lake in the park.

We bought poultry food at the local tack and feed store.

There were dozens of them. When they got spooked and all started flying, the breeze was notable.

Park eventually put in a sign to stop feeding them and took out the benches.

Comment by huck0 4 days ago

Really love this. Very relaxing to listen to this in the background.

Comment by tamimio 4 days ago

One of my new hobbies is feeding the ducks by the river every other day. One time they were a bit far and there was a steep slope between me and the ducks, I threw some of the seeds and went back to sit on the bench, pulled my phone and got distracted, few minutes later and there was almost 100 ducks surrounding me and staring waiting for food, I have no idea from where they came from! After they got fed they all went to sleep.

Comment by krokodeal 4 days ago

I was vibe coding a simple three.js bird world simulation when reading this, guess we're building a three.js duck pond simulation now.

Comment by andai 4 days ago

More info at the repo:

https://github.com/celphase/duck-pond

Also replies by author in this sub thread below:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50131006#50135405

Comment by riedel 3 days ago

And I thought this was something like rubber duck synthesizer revival [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukVC6mJOWtA

Comment by LewisOrton 4 days ago

Do androids feed electric ducks

btw i found it works very well as white noise

Comment by bigtech 4 days ago

Finally!

Comment by RonanSoleste 4 days ago

I love it. However i would love to walk around the pool and the ducks seem to stay with me a lot. But minor issues :)

Comment by krokodeal2 1 day ago

It does not have walking but you can look around: gitman.io/krokodeal/quack

Comment by polloxtroy 4 days ago

U have the peas

Comment by cainxinth 4 days ago

I have nothing to add other than this is very relaxing and I love duck’s names.

Comment by blouis 3 days ago

A feeding ducks synthesizer... total 2026. nice!

Comment by hypfer 4 days ago

A while back I played around with the clanker and got it to build a fully synthesized woodcock peent as a standalone html file.

That then became embedded as an easter egg into some other software.

Ducks were too hard for it though, unfortunately.

Lately, I again threw a clanker at something like that and got it to recreate some MGS codec sound effects.

Comment by Wolfenstein98k 3 days ago

Sorry to off-topic, but why use a word designed to sound denigrating and like a slur?

I'm 0th percentile on the "AIs can feel/are alive" spectrum, but I still think it's probably bad for your soul to use a word that sounds like a horrid slave owner speaking of their property in the 18th century

Comment by hypfer 3 days ago

It's a reminder of reality.

It counters the very effective PR of the corps that currently pretend that humanity is approaching its natural end, when in reality, that could not be further from the truth.

It is supposed to sound like that, because the other side keeps claiming that we would have created gods.

I don't think it's bad for my soul. I believe it is good for our souls to focus empathy on life known to be.. well. real. And not just a next token predictor on steroids.

Comment by yhjc2692 4 days ago

This is freaking awesome

Comment by Hugsbox 4 days ago

I adore this. Thanks OP

Comment by MitPitt 4 days ago

i suppose this is an environment noise generator, with duck calls just being recordings. i wish you could control ducks individually, after i threw peas they just hang out near mic forever

Comment by erikschoster 4 days ago

It does appear to synthesize the audio with a wasm module compiled from rust, presumably developed as a python script first based on the source comments.

https://github.com/celphase/duck-pond/blob/main/src/synth.rs

To the credit of the author there is also an attribution file which describes a process of deriving the models from recordings (none of the techniques are very novel, but it's fairly impressive to see automated -- edit: I assume the project is LLM-generated) https://github.com/celphase/duck-pond/blob/main/ATTRIBUTION....

Comment by celphase 4 days ago

The project was created with significant LLM use, I'd add claude as a co-contributor if I could do so manually. I don't personally like to have it added as a co-author on commits on my own projects, though I always make sure it's there if I submit PRs using it.

Honestly I can't take credit for any major input on it other than a few technical choices. Audio is entirely outside my wheelhouse beyond what happens at the platform API level.

The process involved running the LLM in a loop to gradually correct parameters of a synthesis stack to have the spectrogram of the output match the spectrogram of a real recorded sample. One funny part is where the synthesis was marked by a classification model as more duck than the real duck sample.

Comment by nickludlam 19 hours ago

I'm super late to this, but I'm looking through the code, being inspired to figure out how it works, and one thing you mention is that synth.rs is a port of synth.py. Is the python code anywhere I would LOVE to get hold of it, rather than make a dirty port from scratch if possible.

Comment by sublinear 4 days ago

> the synthesis was marked by a classification model as more duck than the real duck sample

The quality of a recording can throw off most classifiers.

Models we have today are so dependent on the quality of training data, that it's questionable how we will sustain long term what we are currently calling "AI".

i.e. What happens when the cameras and microphones everyone has in their pockets are significantly higher quality and the AI model hasn't had a total refresh in a long time? How does that cause classification to drift enough to fail?

Comment by celphase 4 days ago

This actually uses no recordings. All duck sounds are modeled live, with the quacks and rhaebs specifically modeling the duck's syrinx and vocal tract. The github repository has a full technical breakdown.

Comment by chimneychanga 4 days ago

that was fun thanks

Comment by setnone 4 days ago

i confirm this is very high quality