Morse Code Sound Generator

How the Morse Code Sound works

Morse code sound generator: what to know first

Morse code is a timing language before it is an alphabet. Reading it off a page as dots and dashes teaches you the shapes, but it does not teach you the thing an operator actually does, which is recognising a rhythm by ear. This tool exists for the ear half: it turns your text into a real keyed tone with the standard proportions, so you can hear what a letter sounds like rather than count its symbols.

The timing is the specification. Everything in Morse is measured in dot lengths, called units. A dot is one unit of tone. A dash is three. The gap between elements inside a letter is one unit, the gap between letters is three, and the gap between words is seven. Those ratios are not stylistic — they are what makes the code decodable, and they are why a single speed number is enough to describe a transmission. Speed is quoted in words per minute against the reference word PARIS, which is exactly fifty units long, so one unit equals 1.2 seconds divided by the words-per-minute figure. At 20 wpm a dot is 60 milliseconds.

Two speeds, because learning needs them. Character speed sets how fast the dots and dashes inside each letter are sent; overall speed sets how much silence sits between letters and words. Setting the character speed higher than the overall speed is called Farnsworth timing, and it is the standard way to learn: you hear each letter at the crisp, full-speed rhythm you will eventually need to recognise, but you get generous thinking time between them. Start with characters at 18 to 20 wpm and overall at 8 to 10, then close the gap as the letters become instant rather than working the character speed up from slow — slow letters are a different rhythm and have to be unlearned.

Why the tone sounds the way it does. A keyed tone is a sine wave switched on and off, but switching it instantly produces a click, because an abrupt edge contains energy at every frequency. Real keyers shape the edges over a few milliseconds, and so does this one, which is why the result sounds soft rather than percussive. The pitch is yours to choose: 600 to 800 Hz is the traditional range because it sits where hearing is sensitive and narrow receiver filters are centred, but if you have hearing loss in that region, move it.

What gets sent and what does not. Letters, digits and the common punctuation marks that have official Morse representations are all keyed. Anything without one — an emoji, an accented letter, a character from a non-Latin script — is skipped rather than approximated, and the readout shows exactly which elements were produced so you can see what was dropped. Case is ignored, since Morse has none.

The export is the same signal. Pressing Export re-renders the identical schedule offline and hands you a WAV file, so what you save is sample-for-sample what you heard rather than a recording of your speakers. That makes it usable as practice material on a phone, as a sound bed, or as a test signal for a decoder.

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