Instruments

There are two types of tracks available in the Highcharts sonification module: Instrument tracks and Speech tracks. An instrument track is a track that plays a sequence of notes using the built-in Highcharts synthesizer.

All configuration options for instrument tracks can be found under defaultInstrumentOptions  in the API documentation.

Available Presets

There are several presets available for different instrument sounds. Broadly speaking there are 4 different types of sounds:

1. Plucked, staccato sounds that do not sustain: This includes presets such as piano, vibraphone and plucked. These work well when you want separation between notes. Note duration mapping has no effect on these.
2. Continuous, sustained sounds: This includes presets such as flute, saxophone, basic1 and basic2. These instruments work well for continuous playing.
3. Percussion sounds: These are sounds without melody, such as chop, shaker and noise. Mapping to pitch has no effect on these.
4. Effect sounds: These are sounds that have some additional effects added to them that varies with pitch, such as wind and wobble.

The below demo shows off the available instrument presets:

Custom Presets

It is possible to create your own custom presets by giving configuration options for a SynthPatch  object.

The demo below illustrates this:

Using Synth Classes Directly

Both the Highcharts.sonification.SynthPatch  class and the Highcharts.sonification.SonificationInstrument  class can be used directly as a platform for creating custom sound experiences and sonifications.

The below demo shows a use case with SynthPatch where we create a simple sonification manually.

Next Steps

We have talked about instruments, next up is exploring speech .