Eleven Sites Call Themselves Gesture Synth. One Person Made It.

If you came here because you tried Gesture Synth and got no sound, skip to the fix — it is almost always one thing, and it is not your microphone.

How it actually works

Gesture Synth uses MediaPipe hand-landmark detection to track both hands through your webcam, and Tone.js to generate audio in the browser. Everything runs locally in the page; no video is uploaded anywhere, because there is no server doing the tracking.

There are two modes, and the control split is the thing worth learning:

Gesture mode is the one people share, because holding up three fingers and hearing a chord is immediately legible. Theremin mode is harder to play and much harder to play well — continuous pitch with no frets means no safety net.

Browser support: desktop Chrome or Edge is what to use. Both expose the camera and Web Audio behaviour the app expects. Mobile browsers vary, and Safari in particular is where most of the "it does not work" reports come from.

If you get no sound

This is the single most common complaint, and the symptom is specific: hand tracking works, you can see the dots following your fingers, and nothing comes out of the speakers.

That pattern almost always points at one cause. Browsers deliberately start an AudioContext in a suspended state and will not let a page make noise until the user has genuinely interacted with it — a click or a key press. A webcam seeing your hand move is not a user interaction as far as the browser is concerned. So if you load the page and go straight to waving, tracking starts and audio never does.

In order, try:

• Click anywhere on the page, or press the start/play control, before gesturing. This is the fix in most cases.
• Check the browser tab is not muted. Right-click the tab in Chrome or Edge; if it says "Unmute site" you have found it.
• Check your output device. If you plugged in headphones after loading the page, the audio graph may still be pointed at the old device. Reload.
• Switch to desktop Chrome or Edge if you are on Safari or a mobile browser.
• Disable aggressive content blockers for the page. Some block the audio worklet or the MediaPipe assets.

If tracking also fails, that is a different problem: the camera permission was denied, or another application is holding the camera open. Close anything else using the webcam and reload.

Why there are a dozen sites with the same name

Search for Gesture Synth and you will find, among others: gesturesynth.art, gesturesynth.me, gesturesynth.co, gesturesynth.net, gesturesynth.org, gesturesynth.fun, gesture-synth.com, gesture-synth.co, gesture-synth.org, gesynth.com, synthgesture.com and gesturesynthweld.com.

These are not twelve products. The original project is open source, which means anyone may take the code, put their own styling on it and host it on a domain they bought. That is what has happened, at scale, because the term is getting search traffic and the code is free.

You do not have to take that on trust. One of them, gesturesynth.art, states it plainly in its own footer: "A re-skinned version of the original open-source tool by Ethan and Eric." It does not link the original project or name the licence it is operating under.

Several have gone further and built out guide and troubleshooting pages for the term — camera setup, how-to-play, no-sound fixes — which is how a search for a one-person side project ends up returning a dozen content-marketing sites.

How to tell where you have landed

• Look for a named creator. The original credits a person. Re-skins generally credit nobody, or name them without linking anything.
• Look for a link to the source repository. An honest fork of an open-source project links back to it. Its absence is the tell.
• Look at the footer. Badge-site and directory links with no stated relationship to the tool are a marketing-site signal, not a product signal.
• Be wary of anything asking for an account, a payment or a download. The original needs none of the three. Any version that does has added something, and you should want to know what.

Using a re-skin is not dangerous in itself — it is the same code, running locally in your browser. The reason to prefer the original is that you can see who wrote it and what it does, and the person who built it gets the credit.

Something genuinely different: gesture.live

Among the sites using this idea, one is an actual separate project rather than a re-skin. gesture.live, by Robin van Soelen, is built on the same foundations — Tone.js and MediaPipe — but makes a real design change: chords are played with one hand, which frees the other for melodies, drum and bass patterns and effects.

That is a meaningful difference. Gesture Synth occupies both hands on harmony, so you play pads. gesture.live gives one hand back, so you can play something over the top. The maker notes it was designed for home use and has not been tested in front of a live audience. It is free.

If you have exhausted what Gesture Synth does and want more than chords, that is where to go next — and it is the one credible answer to "what else is there", as opposed to the same app on a different domain.

What it is good for, honestly

It is a genuinely clever toy and a good teaching tool. Finger count to chord degree makes diatonic harmony physical in a way a piano roll does not, and that is a real pedagogical win. The loop sequencer and WAV export mean you can get an idea out of it.

It is not a performance instrument. Webcam hand tracking has latency, it degrades in poor light, and it has no tactile feedback, so precise timing is out of reach. The reports of it failing on various browsers are a reminder that this is a side project that went viral, not a shipped product with a support team.

Treat it as what it is: a free, imaginative browser experiment worth twenty minutes, by one developer, that a dozen domains are now monetising on his behalf.

FAQ

What is Gesture Synth?

A free browser-based musical instrument that uses your webcam to track your hands and turn gestures into sound. Your left hand selects chord degrees by how many fingers you hold up and your wrist tilt switches major to minor; your right hand controls volume, tone and octave. It uses MediaPipe for hand tracking and Tone.js for audio, runs locally in the page, and needs no install or account.

Which Gesture Synth site is the real one?

The original is hosted at gesture-synth-weld.vercel.app, with its source on GitHub, credited to Eric Wei. The roughly dozen other domains using the name host re-skinned copies of that same open-source code — one of them, gesturesynth.art, says so in its own footer. There is some confusion over attribution: that footer credits "Ethan and Eric" while published coverage credits Eric Wei alone, and the copies crediting nobody are part of why the record is muddy.

Why does Gesture Synth have no sound?

Almost always because the browser has not yet allowed the page to make noise. Browsers start audio suspended until a real user interaction — a click or key press — and a webcam seeing your hand does not count as one. Click the page or press the start control before gesturing. If that does not do it, check the tab is not muted, check your output device and reload, and use desktop Chrome or Edge rather than Safari.

Is Gesture Synth free? Does it need an account?

Yes, free, and no account. The original requires no sign-up, no payment and no download. If a version of it asks you for any of those, you are on something other than the original, and it is worth asking what has been added.

Is my webcam video being uploaded?

On the original, no — hand tracking runs in your browser via MediaPipe, so frames are processed locally and there is no server receiving them. That is a property of how the app is built rather than a promise you have to trust. Re-skinned copies run the same client-side code, but since they also add their own analytics and hosting, a privacy claim on one of those sites is only as good as whoever runs it, and most do not say who that is.

Can I use it commercially, or build my own version?

The project is open source and published coverage reports it as free for educational and non-commercial use with credit to the creator. Check the LICENSE file in the repository before relying on that — the exact terms govern what you may do, and a summary in an article, including this one, is not the licence. If you fork it, credit the original and link the source. The dozen domains that did not are the reason this article needs to exist.

Sources, checked 17 October 2026: Gesture Synth (original) · a2aprotocol writeup, 16 Aug 2026 · gesture.live on Product Hunt

See our directory listing: Gesture Synth