Show HN: A sequencer driven by chess games
adamf.github.ioHear your chess game as music!
I originally made this for a music hack day in 2013 but just did a major update. You can now select samples, octaves, paste in a PGN, and more. Very cool, it reminds me a bit of those musical cellular automata things I’ve seen. A couple of suggestions: it might be interesting to try different types of scales like a pentatonic scale and maybe add a way to disallow certain intervals such as 2nds for example. Consider adding percussion tied to certain kinds of moves. For example, you could have a distinct sound when someone is put in check, so there’s an auditory cue. This last one would be a bit trickier, but you might also experiment with changing the timbre to create a sense of suspense as the material advantage (or some engine's eval score) starts to favor one player or the other. I like those suggestions - I had pentatonic at first but ended up liking the minimalism/Steve Reich of what is there now (including the 2nds when they hit). Adding a scale selector in the settings should be easy, and actually the timbre shouldn’t be too hard. Percussion I’ve thought about but need to experiment; I can’t get it to sound correct and have it responsive to the game.