Happy Belated Birthday: Bob Moog

I'm a little late on this one – Moog's birthday and International Synthesizer Day were on the 23rd.

If you caught our last post, you maybe noticed a computerized chess board that didn't actually play chess. You could move the pieces around any way you wanted but you could never get it to complain about an illegal move or make a move itself.

That's partly because I dislike the orthodoxy of chess. Almost everybody I've ever played Scrabble or Monopoly with has a series of house rules that are just understood to be natural but which are captured nowhere in the pamphlet. One of the problems with computerizing these games is that the computers are usually too dumb to be taught these house rules. The game engines play some sanitized version where you can't manipulate the bank or quadruple word score when you play the initials of a US government agency. Boring.

There are lots of things you can do with some chess pieces and a board. Today, I present it to you again as a synthesizer. Each piece makes a sound. Beats move left to right. Frequency rises with row. Click (start) below to make it start. Click (stop) to make it stop. Move the pieces around just as you like. Nobody will tell you that a move is invalid.

It may seem like there is no user interface for you to tweak the synth, but that's not quite so. Edit and reevaluate the code using the hints below and you can rearrange the starting pieces, rearrange the functions that generate the tones, or make any other change you want. Not totally unlike the digital version of an analog synth.

If you find yourself on the avenue by Radio City with a transistor and a large sum of money to spend, retrofit a minimoog with MIDI. From there, you can control it directly from your chessboard. You're on your own for pitch bending, though. My chessboard doesn't do that yet.