Deharm - A small app I made for deharmonizing sounds

zkom · January 10, 2022

In the "Programming" thread I mentioned that I was playing around with spectral editing in Python. Shifting the frequencies and what not and then writing it into a sound file. I decided to make a simple GUI with Kivy for one of the processes and I put it in GitHub in case anyone else might be interested.

Basically the app shifts frequencies linearly instead of proportionally which breaks the harmonic frequencies making melodies and chords sound out of tune and making harmonic sounds sound alien or artificial. Here's a simple example with Für Elise on piano:

You can basically use it to turn any melodic piece into microtonal weirdness. :sorcerer: Also additional weirdness is provided if you turn off the short-time FFT and play around the frequencies. This causes some sounds to be reversed in weird ways due to phase reversals (to my best guess).

The GitHub page is here https://github.com/kzmo/deharm

You can run the app with Python or download the stand-alone .exe for Windows from the GitHub page. The stand-alone .exe also requires FFMPEG binaries somewhere in the path or same directory as the .exe file in Windows.

I haven't tested it much yet but it seems to work at least on Windows 10 and Python 3.9. The stand-alone .exe should work on all Windows 10 PCs as long as FFMPEG is present. Linux maybe works or needs some minor modifications (hopefully). In theory the Python scripts should also work on macOS and Android. Anyway, if you have some problems on any platform just tell me (via GitHub or WATMM) so at least I know where it doesn't work and I might be able to fix it later. :cattears: