Sirenfall, a civil defense siren synthesized in Web Audio
Details
- External ID
- 49556678
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Sirenfall, a civil defense siren synthesized in Web Audio
- Website domain
- sirenfall.live
- Launched
- Sept. 3, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.12998405103668262
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
Description
I built a cool browser scene, a shelter window over a dystopian city in the rain. Pull the breaker and a siren tower spins up. The wind-down is super unsettling and I love it.The siren is not a recording. Two port rings make a 5:6 dual tone, 515 and 618 Hz. The horn turns at 4 RPM and everything (loudness, brightness, doppler and stereo position) follows the horn angle you can see on the tower. Rain and thunder are the only recordings.Build it yourself, source is one HTML file and MIT: https://github.com/beeswaxpat/sirenfallHow it works: https://sirenfall.live/how-it-worksPress F for fullscreen, S to save a picture. Landscape on phones. No cookies, no personal data, the only request besides audio is an anonymous page-count pixel.Appreciate any feedback and shoutout to the siren community!
Enrichment
- Theme
- audio utilities and sound management
- Vertical
- Government
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- civil defense siren audio tool
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial The visual shelter scene is simple canvas/CSS, but physically modeling a mechanical dual-tone siren's acoustic behavior and Doppler horn rotation purely via Web Audio synthesis requires specialized audio engineering.
What it would actually take: The implementation relies on the Web Audio API using custom AudioWorklet processors or oscillator nodes coupled with panners and bi-quad filters. The hard part is mathematical acoustic modeling: simulating air-flow chop across a dual-port rotor (5:6 frequency ratio), rotor inertia spin-up/spin-down curves, and rotational directional acoustic directivity (Doppler shift and HRTF panning). This requires digital audio signal processing and acoustic physics knowledge.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Sound output too clean and Hi-Fi, unrealistic for mechanical sirens, Missing mechanical distortion and wobble characteristics
Feature requests: Emulate spinning metal parts inertia and spin-up/spin-down behavior, Add mechanical distortion from vibrating parts, Implement realistic frequency wobble effects
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 59 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #57 of 60 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 309 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Safe-now.live · hn · 2026-02-03 · 195 upvotes · similarity 0.36
- Sleep Sounds · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.35
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.