Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Please go to Google’s Home page right now to look at the Google Doodle for Robert Moog‘s¹ 78th Birthday – its a fully functional synthesizer that you can play on and record yourself!

It works slightly better in Chrome although the latest Firefoxes can also handle the moogdoodle. I wouldn’t count on anything else being able to play this demo that uses the experimental Web Audio API for HTML 5 that looks to aiming to bring to the web, all the capabilities of a Commodore 64 SID ;-).

Things you can do (The knobs are unfortunately unmarked, so I had to guess what each knob does):

• The keyboard is obviously fully active and you can play every note. You mouse is not an appropriate tool for playing on a synthesizer – use the letter keys to hit the white keys, and the number keys to hit the black keys.
• All the knobs are operational – click on a knob once to advance it to the next preset value (in jumps of 1 or 2), or click and drag to twiddle it around to arbitrary values.
• Change the pitch of the sound using the left wheel.
• Change the volume using the knobs in the mixer panel – the large knob controls the total volume while the smaller knobs control the mixing of each oscillator separately.
• Change the oscillators setup in the oscillators panel – the left knobs control each of the three oscillators’ stepping, the right knobs control the wave form of the corresponding oscillator and I’m not sure what the two large knobs in the middle are supposed to be doing.
• Apply different filters using the filter panel – I’ve played with this a bit and can’t really figure out what each knob is supposed to do exactly.
• Control the sound envelope in the envelope panel – the three left knobs seems to control (from top to bottom) attach, decay and release. Sustain I think is set, though I may be mistaken here.
• Use the connected 4 track recorder to record what you play in 4 channels – first select the track to record by clicking on the correct VU meter so it is highlighted, then click record and play something on the synthesizer. when you are done click stop and the recorder will move automatically to the next track, or you can choose your own. Press record to record the next track, and you can hear your previous track play back so you can play along yourself.
• Play what you recorded – hit play and you will hear all 4 tracks play simultaneously.
• Share what you record – hit the g+ icon to share your creation on Google+, or hit the link icon to get a link you can send to people.

I’m not a musician, but I’d love to hear what you people have cooked up, so send me some links 🙂

Related articles

• Who is Robert Moog? Secrets behind the Google doodle (mirror.co.uk)
• Bob Moog’s Birthday: Learn Synthesis, Benefit Swag, Apps, and a Playable Google Doodle [Videos] (createdigitalmusic.com)
• Tomorrow’s Google homepage is an epic playable tribute to the Moog synthesizer (thenextweb.com)

1. Inventor of the analog synthesizer [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012 at 01:08 and is filed under Funny, Software, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.