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Multi-player piano

multiplayerpiano.com

110 points by maxjaderberg 14 years ago · 40 comments

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blackhole 14 years ago

Completely impractical but hilarious. Would be significantly more practical if there was a way to have private rooms instead of just making a new one that is inevitably overrun.

lazerwalker 14 years ago

Smule's launch-era iPad piano app (maybe it was called 'Magic Piano'?) had a similar feature, but it was only you and one other anonymous person. I thought that was a lot more effective, since if the two of you could figure out how to coordinate without speaking/chatting you could have a really fantastic jam; the massive number of people on this makes it hard to create anything that doesn't resemble complete cacophony.

The_Sponge 14 years ago

More fun than playing the piano: following someone's cursor and watching them try to shake you off.

joshontheweb 14 years ago

Pretty sweet! I think real-time social collaborative apps like this are going to become more prominent.

Our multi-player beat machine http://eightbitbeats.com

siavosh 14 years ago

This is magical, I can't correlate the combination of visual/symbolic/musical elements to any real world analogues. Auditory/musical interactions should be explored by more people in the startup community.

p9idf 14 years ago

Here's a multi-player synthesizer: http://synth.media.mit.edu/patchwerk/

nau-ka 14 years ago

It seems like there’s a lot of room for expansion in terms of music software and games. Off the top of my head: Allow musicians to attach their instruments to the computer and play duets with friends or strangers. Use software to practice a song and analyze where you make the most mistakes. Make a game out of it – sight reading competitions, short duets, music battles (ala http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-FdX1D5hVg). Vote performances up and down…

Gatsky 14 years ago

Time for a turing-esque test... can you reliably distinguish 50 random people playing a web piano with their mouse from an avant garde piano composition?

brink 14 years ago

I really don't understand why every simple demo of websockets makes it to the front page. Multi-player paint, multi-player piano, multi-player chord riffs... It's all just small variations on the same technology. I don't really see what valuable lesson we're supposed to take away from this when a simple websockets demo makes it to the front page again and again.

  • user24 14 years ago

    Eh, it's still a fairly new technology, it's interesting (and fun) to see what people are doing with it, what it's capable of, and so on.

z0ot 14 years ago

ok..just wasted two hours.. need a way to select the starting key for your keyboard so you can really rock this thing.

memset 14 years ago

This is the coolest thing.

Another feature request: Chat! So that we can coordinate with each other to play a song!

  • jasomill 14 years ago

    Nah — that'd be too easy. It's more interesting to see how people learn to communicate solely through the keyboard.

    Besides, actually attempting to perform "for real" over the Internet would quickly lead to latency-induced frustration — WLAN MIDI is bad enough!

  • antihero 14 years ago

    I actually like the fact that the only way to communicate is by playing sound.

rektide 14 years ago

Do ya'll know about the Sugar Project's Collaborative Activities (Sugar is the UI that once was OLPC)? It uses multi-computer DBus Tubes to enable cross system activities: here's their multi-player MIDI environment where kids can jam together via each of their' computers' on screen or real MIDI devices.

udp 14 years ago

It keeps freezing up for me. I can see everyone playing just fine, but as soon as I hit a few notes everything stops and I get "Offline Mode".

Tried Firefox 11 and Chromium 17.0.963.83 (Arch Linux) and Chrome 17.0.963.56 (OS X).

jamesjyu 14 years ago

This is actually pretty fascinating. People are making rooms for specific songs (like rickrolling), and people are generally trying to play the requested songs in each of the rooms :)

alextgordon 14 years ago

Could really do with having private hidden rooms, so I can play with a few friends without having the whole world barge in.

  • jaredsohn 14 years ago

    You can do this. In the bottom left you can choose among existing rooms or create your own. If you create your own room, you have the option of making it private/hidden (although it seems like it becomes public whenever the server is reset.)

    You can also instantly create your own room by adding /[roomname] to the url (although I don't know if this makes them public or private.)

dbalatero 14 years ago

Can you post the keyboard key layout?

  • srj55 14 years ago

    look at the js file

    var key_binding = { 65: n("gs"), 90: n("a"), 83: n("as"), 88: n("b"), 67: n("c", 1), 70: n("cs", 1), 86: n("d", 1), 71: n("ds", 1), 66: n("e", 1), 78: n("f", 1), 74: n("fs", 1), 77: n("g", 1), 75: n("gs", 1), 188: n("a", 1), 76: n("as", 1), 190: n("b", 1), 191: n("c", 2), 222: n("c#", 2),

    		49: n("gs", 1),
    		81: n("a", 1),
    		50: n("as", 1),
    		87: n("b", 1),
    		69: n("c", 2),
    		52: n("cs", 2),
    		82: n("d", 2),
    		53: n("ds", 2),
    		84: n("e", 2),
    		89: n("f", 2),
    		55: n("fs", 2),
    		85: n("g", 2),
    		56: n("gs", 2),
    		73: n("a", 2),
    		57: n("as", 2),
    		79: n("b", 2),
    		80: n("c", 3),
    		189: n("cs", 3),
    		219: n("d", 3),
    		187: n("ds", 3),
    		221: n("e", 3)
    	};
  • mrchess 14 years ago

    SHIFT and CTROL go UP and DOWN an octave respectively.

10dpd 14 years ago

Are there any good tutorials that provide an implementation walkthrough of this kind of app?

comex 14 years ago

Didn't work for me in Safari; I had to open Chrome to see any key presses.

jjcm 14 years ago

Can I set up a private session with only my friends?

flux_w42 14 years ago

Support for an azerty keyboard would be great :)

hajrice 14 years ago

i somehow feel if you implemented this tech. onto a website multiplayer viewer it'd be really cool. like, reddit for example.

manojlds 14 years ago

It is more like multiplayer follow the mouse.

xarien 14 years ago

Very neat, but my ears do not thank you...

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