I have a long-lasting fear of going to the dentist, and I blame a lot of that fear to the alarming sounds that the dental tools make :'). While learning how to create an interactive FM synthesis site, I realized that the sounds from the synthesis sound awfully alike what I hear at the dentist. That became an inspiration for the animations on this page, and this project turned into both a self-portrait of me confronting my fears and a way for me to perform a silly sound exposure therapy on myself. I'm hoping this project can bring some lightheartedness to my fear, acting as a tool to reimagine the scary medical sounds as a creative experience.

In this project, I use Max/MSP and RNBO to create an FM Synthesis that users can control the resulting sound via parameters. The cursor positions while holding `q`, `w`, and `e` consecutively controls the carrier frequency, harmonicity ratio, and modulation index. Users can also change the shape of one of the waveforms being combined.