Completely impractical but hilarious. Would be significantly more practical if there was a way to have private rooms instead of just making a new one that is inevitably overrun.
Smule's launch-era iPad piano app (maybe it was called 'Magic Piano'?) had a similar feature, but it was only you and one other anonymous person. I thought that was a lot more effective, since if the two of you could figure out how to coordinate without speaking/chatting you could have a really fantastic jam; the massive number of people on this makes it hard to create anything that doesn't resemble complete cacophony.
This is magical, I can't correlate the combination of visual/symbolic/musical elements to any real world analogues. Auditory/musical interactions should be explored by more people in the startup community.
It seems like there’s a lot of room for expansion in terms of music software and games. Off the top of my head: Allow musicians to attach their instruments to the computer and play duets with friends or strangers. Use software to practice a song and analyze where you make the most mistakes. Make a game out of it – sight reading competitions, short duets, music battles (ala http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-FdX1D5hVg). Vote performances up and down…
Time for a turing-esque test... can you reliably distinguish 50 random people playing a web piano with their mouse from an avant garde piano composition?
I really don't understand why every simple demo of websockets makes it to the front page. Multi-player paint, multi-player piano, multi-player chord riffs... It's all just small variations on the same technology. I don't really see what valuable lesson we're supposed to take away from this when a simple websockets demo makes it to the front page again and again.
Do ya'll know about the Sugar Project's Collaborative Activities (Sugar is the UI that once was OLPC)? It uses multi-computer DBus Tubes to enable cross system activities: here's their multi-player MIDI environment where kids can jam together via each of their' computers' on screen or real MIDI devices.
This is actually pretty fascinating. People are making rooms for specific songs (like rickrolling), and people are generally trying to play the requested songs in each of the rooms :)
You can do this. In the bottom left you can choose among existing rooms or create your own. If you create your own room, you have the option of making it private/hidden (although it seems like it becomes public whenever the server is reset.)
You can also instantly create your own room by adding /[roomname] to the url (although I don't know if this makes them public or private.)