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Show HN: A sequencer driven by chess games (adamf.github.io)
3 points by adam_gyroscope 70 days ago
Hear 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I originally made this for a music hack day in 2013 but just did a major update.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.

1 comments

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.