Multiplayer Music Project MPM is complete and live!

Adam Courtney

I have been whittling away at two projects since September, and I am very happy to say that both the Multiplayer Music Project and Synth Museum are complete! Here’s a quick post talking about the MPM project and what it can do.

The MPM project is live and running at mpm.thefunnybrain.com, and I would love some feedback on how the project works, and would welcome anyone to download the project from my Github page and have a look. The aim was to show what’s possible with Web Audio being controlled across the internet, and on a basic level the fundamentals are all there, so I would love to see it taken further by someone with greater enthusiasm and less University workload.

Currently the features include:

  • A controllable oscillator for every player, with their pitch controlled by a slider or piano keyboard
  • The oscillator can be a sine, triangle, square or sawtooth wave, changable by the user
  • 3 step sequencers which are controlled by every user, with changes being reflected in real-time
  • The sequencer instruments are: Bass, Lead, and a primitive Drum Machine (kick, snare, hi-hat)
  • Each sequencer can be individually lengthened and shortened, leading to wacky timings where each instrument can have their own time signature.
  • Changable tempo settings mean that the music can be sped up and slowed using a slider

A few notes:

  • The delay feature is a planned element, but the button to select the effect currently does nothing.
  • The site should be responsive for mobile devices, but I have had reports of the site acting strangely.
  • Running the site on a server or localhost needs NodeJS, but the Raining Chain tutorials I’ve linked below talk through the process better than I ever could!

Here are some resources I found incredibly useful on this journey:

Raining Chain’s tutorial was invaluable, and I can’t recommend it enough for anyone looking to make a multiplayer browser game. I also need to say thank you to Ben Taylor for his incredible Nexus UI project, from which I was able to make the site functional and easy to use. He also incredibly kindly answered a few questions I had with the piano, so major thank you’s are in order! All the pianos, sliders and gadgets in this project and the Synth Museum are from Nexus, and I highly recommend looking into it.

 

 

 

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