Samuel F. B. Morse created a code for the electric telegraph in the early 1840s that allowed alphanumeric characters to be encoded into a sequence of short and long tones. It is still widely used among radio operators as a means of identifying themselves, as well as communicating messages over a channel too narrow or noisy for speech transmission.¹

This plugin will transcribe the morse code for text in the selected elements. In browsers that support the <ruby> HTML element, the transcription will appear above the text. By default, clicking on these elements will play the corresponding audio for the transcription.

Bleeps and bloops speak louder than words:

Try it out at: http://mattt.github.com/Morse.js/

Note: Requires browser with support for HTML5 <audio>, such as Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, or Chrome

$("p").morseCode({bpm:12});

• bpm rate at which the message is played (default: 12, or 1 unit = 100ms)

In addition, there are two namespaced events that you can trigger and bind to:

• morse.emit will generate and play the tones for morse code elements
• morse.mute will stop morse code tone sounds from <audio> elements

• jQuery 1.4+

Javascript client-side WAV generation based on code by sk89q See http://sk89q.therisenrealm.com/ for more info.

Thanks to Justin Slepak for adding support for punctuation characters.

Mattt Thompson

• http://github.com/mattt
• http://twitter.com/mattt
• [email protected]

Morse.js is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.