While writing to direct your attention toward this multiplayer virtual piano, I left it up in a tab, and one of two things are happening: In some weird way, the group piano playing effort is going wonderfully and is some kind of ingenius experiment to show that if at least one person is trying in the middle of all the key-mashing, music can happen — or I’m going insane. For some reason, though, underneath all the key-mashing and those few, poor people actually trying to play traditional music, the multiplayer virtual piano is actually providing an interesting soundscape.
The project couldn’t be simpler; a virtual keyboard sits on the screen, while people in control of their own mouse cursor are able to hit a key and play a note. If one wants to get away from the madness of the main lobby, which has the largest population of users, one can make a different room and point friends in that direction by use of a menu toward the botton of the page. Unfortunately, the rooms cannot be made private at this time, so they could in theory be overrun with the same stampede of people found in the lobby.
However, after spending a bit of time in the relatively heavily populated lobby, I’d suggest sticking around in there, and after playing around with the application for a bit, to simply leave it up in a tab while you move on to do other things. Yes, a lot of people tend to mash keys without regard, but there are bursts of actually decent music, even when, by the sound of it, you can tell it wasn’t intentional.
If you browse through some of the different rooms, you’ll find that users may have created rooms for specific songs, and everyone in said room seems to agree to the preset song and complies. Overall, though, the multiplayer piano isn’t too highly populated, so it’s probably best to stick to the lobby and see what madness transpires.
(via Hacker News)
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Published: Mar 26, 2012 09:30 am