Music Machinery

It is Music Hack Day Boston this weekend. I worked with my daughter Jennie (of Jennie’s Ultimate Roadtrip fame) to build a music hack. This year we wanted to build a hack that actually made music. And so we built Bohemian Rhapsichord.

Bohemian Rhapsichord is a web app that turns the song Bohemian Rhapsody into a musical instrument.  It uses TheEcho Nest analyzer to break the song into segments of quasi-stable musical events. It then shows these as an array of colored tiles (where the colors are based on timbre) that you can interact with like a musical instrument.

If you click on a tile, you play that portion of the song (or hold down shift or control and play tiles just by mousing over them).  You can bind different segments to keys letting you play the ‘instrument’ with your keyboard too (See the FAQ for all the details).   You can re-sort the tiles based on a few criteria (sequential order, by loudness, duration or by similarity to the last played note).  It is a fun way to make music based on one of the best songs in the world.

The app makes use of the very new (and not always the most stable) web audio API. Currently, the only browser that I know that supports the web audio API is Chrome.    The app is online so give it a try:  Bohemian Rhapsichord