I built a fart sound generator instead of another soundboard

I built a fart sound generator. It is called Fart Sounds, it is free, and it does one thing the other fart apps do not: it makes the sound instead of playing one back.

The reason is embarrassingly small. My kid asked me to install a fart app, so I downloaded a handful from the Play Store, and every single one of them was the same app wearing a different icon. A grid of twenty buttons. Tap one, hear a recording. After about ten taps you have heard everything the app will ever do, and there is nothing left.

That is not a fart app problem, it is a design problem. If the sound comes out of a file, the app ends the moment you have heard every file. A fart sounds maker should keep going after the twentieth tap.

▶ Get it on Google Play (free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefacegood.bboong

Every fart app I tried was the same twenty buttons

Real farts do not come in twenty discrete flavours. They sit on a continuum. Short and clipped at one end, long and drawn out at the other. Thin and squeaky through to low and rumbling. Bone dry through to bubbling and sputtering. All of the interesting sounds live in the gaps between whatever twenty files somebody recorded.

So the app had to compute the sound at the moment you press play, not fetch it.

The home screen of the fart sound generator showing a waveform of the sound you just built

What a fart sound generator does that a grid cannot

I settled on three axes: length, thickness and wetness.

Length goes anywhere between a quick blip and a long, dragged-out rip. Thickness runs from a thin squeak up to a deep rumbling blast. Wetness runs from completely dry to bubbling and sputtering. Move any one of them and the sound genuinely changes, because nothing is being selected from a list. A waveform is drawn above the sliders and it moves as you do, so you get a rough idea of what you are about to hear before you hear it.

If starting from a blank slate feels like work, there are eight presets to begin from. Pick one, nudge the axis you do not like, and go.

Three sliders labelled length, thickness and wetness controlling the fart sound

I got the sound wrong three times

This is the part I actually want to write about.

The first version got rejected in four words: that is not a fart. Measuring it proved the point. The spectral centre of my sounds sat around 1800 Hz. Real farts live between roughly 300 and 800 Hz. I had built a toy trumpet. The cause was not tuning, it was the model. I was ringing a smooth sawtooth continuously, when the real thing is closer to a flapping valve that slams fully shut and open again.

Version two swapped in a pulse train and a body resonance, and the centre dropped to 500 to 900 Hz. Then came the second complaint: the first five presets all sound like the same family. That one measured true as well. The wetness axis was doing almost nothing.

Version three made each slider change the mechanism rather than a number. And then one last thing was still wrong. My sounds kept roughly the same energy from beginning to end, when a real one starts strong and collapses. Adding a pressure curve, so loudness and pitch and brightness all fall together, was what finally got it past the person who had rejected it twice.

Three ways to set it off

It is a prank app, so how you fire it matters. There are three ways.

The first is a prank timer. Set the sneak timer, put the phone down on somebody's desk and walk away. Once armed the screen goes fully black, so nobody can tell the phone is even on. There is also a cover to fire option: put your hand over the top of the phone and the proximity sensor sets it off. Or leave it in your pocket and use the volume keys, which is why the app suppresses the volume popup that would otherwise give you away.

The sneak attack screen armed with a countdown before the fart fires

Every fart you build becomes a card

Each launch registers that slider combination as a card. There are 48 cards, each with a name and a rarity. Some show up immediately and some need you to push an axis close to its limit, which quietly turns the whole thing into a reason to keep building sounds. Any card can be exported as an image with its waveform printed on it, which is the part my kid actually uses.

A collection screen showing 48 fart cards with rarity tiers

Who this is for

• Anyone who installed a fart app, heard all twenty sounds and deleted it the same day
• People who want a wet fart sound one minute and a dry squeak the next
• Anyone who needs a low effort prank for a party or an office
• People who collect things for no defensible reason
• Anyone who is uneasy about a sound app asking for microphone access

Download (Google Play, free): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefacegood.bboong

※ Treat this as a gag, nothing more. The phone synthesises each sound from scratch, so no real person was ever recorded. Do not spring it on anyone who has not agreed to be pranked, and keep the loudness reasonable when you are out in public.

It runs fully offline, there is no sign up, and it weighs about 3MB. If you find a combination that sounds wrong, tell me. I have rewritten this synthesiser three times already and a fourth would not kill me.