nomusby Agrohi

Keep the voice. Lose the music.

nomus takes the music out of any tab, your whole computer, or your phone, and keeps the voices. A small Rust engine does it on your device. Your audio never leaves it.

Get nomusTry the demo

The real engine, running in this page

idle

Press play, then switch the music off.

Why take the music out

60%

Hear what people are saying

Background music is one of the most common reasons viewers struggle to follow speech, and it is hardest on people with hearing loss.

BBC TV audibility survey, 2011. RNID survey of members with hearing loss, 1998.

Focus on the lesson

Adding music to a lesson made people remember less of it. Lectures and tutorials work better without it.

Moreno and Mayer, Journal of Educational Psychology, 2000.

For those who choose to avoid music

Some people keep away from instrumental music for faith, a period of mourning or grief. nomus lets them keep the words.

Watch it without the mood music

Music makes what you see feel stronger, and sounds help short videos spread. Turn it off and judge what is being said.

Baumgartner et al., International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2006. TikTok, 2020.

Fewer music claims on stream

Twitch reports that over 99% of its music takedowns were for background tracks. nomus removes most of that track. It does not grant rights to anyone's video.

Twitch, Music-related copyright claims, 2020.

Easier on sensitive ears

Many autistic people find everyday sound too loud. Less music also means fewer songs stuck in your head at night.

Williams et al., Ear and Hearing, 2021. Scullin et al., Psychological Science, 2021.

A Rust engine in your browser's audio thread

A small neural network listens to 10 ms of sound at a time and decides, for every frequency, how much of it is a voice. Speech and singing pass. Instruments fade out. In Chrome it runs as WebAssembly; the macOS, Linux and Android apps run the same engine and weights natively.

  1. The tab's sound

    Chrome hands nomus the audio of the tab you chose, and nothing else.

  2. An AudioWorklet

    A real-time audio thread feeds the engine in 480-sample frames.

  3. nomus.wasm

    Rust, compiled to WebAssembly with no imports: it cannot reach the network or disk.

  4. Your speakers

    The voices, 20 ms later.

crates/nomus-core/src/voice_mask.rs
// One GRU layer, one 10 ms frame. PyTorch gate order: r, z, n.
matvec(&g.w_ih, &self.x, &g.b_ih, &mut self.gates_i);
matvec(&g.w_hh, hid, &g.b_hh, &mut self.gates_h);
for j in 0..h {
    let r = sigmoid(self.gates_i[j] + self.gates_h[j]);
    let z = sigmoid(self.gates_i[h + j] + self.gates_h[h + j]);
    let n = (self.gates_i[2 * h + j]
        + r * self.gates_h[2 * h + j]).tanh();
    self.h_new[j] = (1.0 - z) * n + z * hid[j];
}
Delay
20 ms
Engine
0.8 MB
Weights
1.04 M
CPU
~2%
of one core
Audio sent anywhere
0 bytes
on every platform

Your audio never leaves your device.

No server

Filtering happens on your computer or phone. There is no nomus server for sound to go to.

No tracking

No account, no analytics, no cookies. nomus does not count you, the sites you visit or what you play.

Enforced, not promised

The extension and this site declare a connect-src policy, so the browser blocks requests to any other server. The Android app has no internet permission at all.

The one request nomus makes: the macOS and Linux apps check for updates when they start. The request names the system and processor type and nothing else, not even the app's version. You can turn it off in the app.

Check it yourself: open DevTools, pick the Network tab, and play something. Read the privacy page or the extension's source

What to expect

Works well

  • Talks, lectures, podcasts and news with a music bed under them
  • Short videos with a trending track over someone speaking
  • Songs, when you want the vocals and not the band

Still hard

  • Music much louder than the voice: some of it comes through
  • Instruments that sound like a voice, such as a solo violin
  • On Android, apps that block audio capture, such as Spotify and Netflix: they play unfiltered

Get nomus

Free, with no account. Pick where you listen.

Windows: the Chrome extension works there. A Windows app is not planned: Windows can copy what apps play but cannot silence the original, so filtering the whole system would need a signed kernel audio driver.