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asurty
That was fun! Somehow I feel like I came up with a tune that already exists - https://music-grid.surge.sh/#256-80-256-40-256-32-256-288-12...
JansjoFromIkea
RE: audio on iOS

Just a heads up as I've had the same issue with a (way more confusing and less fun) thing I done, you need to turn off the silent switch on iPhones to hear the audio. Maybe detect the device and include a prompt?

jimkleiber
Ahh, thank you so much. I was about to report it as a bug! Now time to play!
lukevp
That was enjoyable to play with! Thanks for sharing. I think it would be nicer if it didn't use the anchor tag for storing data which messes up history, especially since it has a built-in share that generates a URL that can recreate the song. It would be cool if it just read the URL in once on load and didn't update it unless share was clicked.
thinkloop
To me the mistake is not having the back/forward buttons honor the different states. It would be a nice built-in undo/redo.
irshadshalu
Hey. Author here.

The history issue is fixed now :). I ended up using replaceState instead of pushState

holler
This is pretty cool! but hitting "back" after adding multiple notes did not work (it got stuck). Could you use query params instead of hash?
afiori
I a different comment they requested exactly this behavior not to push too much stuff on the browsing history. It should be about the way the url is updated rather than fragment vs parameters
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d0m
It's cool that anything sounds great
theon144
Super cute!

I assume it's using the pentatonic scale or other music theory trickery to make "anything" sound good? :)

First try, came up with https://music-grid.surge.sh/#4-2048-8-2114-2-2370-2-2112-321..., am happy

irshadshalu
This actually sounds great. Loved it.

> I assume it's using the pentatonic scale or other music theory trickery to make "anything" sound good? :)

I have no idea. But it works :D

butz
Playback always starts on second row - possible off-by-one error? And a dedicated "Play from start" button would improve experience.
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scrozier
What scale is this? It’s major, but no seventh tone...?
mkchoi212
"Hit Play button. You'll figure it out ;)"

Peak user instructions. Overall, great job :)

alexilliamson
Slightly OT.

It seems like there is an uptick in music production-related posts on HN lately. Which is awesome.

Has it always been like this and I'm just now noticing? Or, if it is a recent phenomenon, do we think it's because folks are trying to connect more with arts, in light of everything going on?

Anyway, this is very cool and I'm happy to see it!

GuiA
It might come and go, but I find it to be pretty consistent. There is, in my experience, a strong overlap between hackers/computer scientists and musicians; for one anecdotal example, Donald Knuth is an accomplished organ player.

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/organ.html

rabidrat
I hope Dr. Knuth is a registered organ donor.
CraigJPerry
The plural of anecdote is not data and all that but COVID resulted in me buying a midi keyboard and I’ve been learning Ableton live.

(And messing about with the idea of using a midi input device to control batch jobs)

jaggirs
The plural of anecdote is data. You just need to know that your anecdotes are reasonably trustworthy.
Kye
Useful Ableton thing: you can paint out a scale in notes, move those notes to -1 (left arrow key), then fold the scale on them. I like to lower the velocity on the top and bottom of each octave so I always know where they start and stop.
uhhyeahdude
It seems as though quarantine/lockdown has been seized as a good opportunity to finally tackle a project or two.

I know three people who are working on something music-related off the top of my head, and and countless more working on something a little more lively than an every day weekend project.

It doesn’t have to be music of course, but I think there is a lot of overlap in the hacker<—>musician Venn diagram, as alluded to above.