On my first waveform card video, a viewer asked if the 3D-printed cards explicitly had to be white to be recognized by the Switch's infrared camera. To me, this seemed like a definite "no" - the camera was just detecting the card's shape, and it couldn't even see light in the visible spectrum.

To answer their question (and to spice things up a little bit - those white cards were starting to look a little drab), I decided to print the cards for this second video using red and yellow filament.

...but when I looked at the cards through the Switch's infrared camera, I noticed that they were letting a lot of light through, and images looked a little "muddier" as a result.

Here's one of the original white cards seen through a yellow card.

In the end, I decided to go with white filament for these 9 new cards, which seemed to produce marginally crisper reads.

Luckily, I had just barely enough white filament left on hand to make it happen.

Here it is, the hit single that's rising in international pop charts, Hunter Irving's "I Like You".

Created entirely using Nintendo LABO and custom 3D-printed Waveform Cards.

https://soundcloud.com/hunter-irving/i-like-you

Four minutes and fifty-nine seconds into my second LABO video, I hit on a popular question that many viewers seemed to have:

Would it be possible to create a Waveform Card that approximates human speech?

To begin with, this felt like a solid "no" to me - if you've ever watched human speech on an oscilloscope, you know that the waveform produced is far from periodic.

However, I noticed that the five vowel sounds ("Ah", "Ee", "Eh", "Ooh", and "Oh") did produce roughly periodic waveforms when spoken alone.

I made 5 more cards using samples from FL Studio's built-in speech synthesizer, and the results (even when digitized by the Switch's low-resolution infrared camera) were fairly impressive.

In a fervent, last-ditch effort to make speech synthesis on Nintendo LABO ToyCon Piano happen, I spent a while layering component vowel sounds in an attempt to approximate human speech.

The results weren't perfect, but with subtitles, I think you can hear what I was going for.

("I Like You" breaks down to "Ah-Ee Ah-Ee-(staccato "Eh" to make a "K" sound) "Eh"-(that blends into)-"Ooh")

I tried.

- Hunter

When I made the files for this project available on hunterirving.com, I had no idea so many people would find them useful.

I guessed that most who downloaded them would use the provided STL files to make 3D-printed cards as I had, but it seems that the SVGs I included turned out to be much more popular:

Reddit user compacta_d used a Kongsberg cutting table to cut these cards from E flute corrugated.

Reddit user AchillesPDX used a hobby laser cutter to cut these cards from cardboard.

Bigtime YouTube channel Melody Geeks even used a few of them in some of their LABO cover videos.


Knowing that other people were able to gain something from my project is a pretty great feeling.

Look forward to more open-source projects from me in the future!

- Hunter