As more and more of our daily web activity consolidates into the predictable feeds of a few major platforms, it's always fun to find web stuff that takes advantage of modern browsers in unexpected ways. This little web toy is a great example. It lets you make music just by typing.
Typedrummer was created by Philadelphia-based developer Kyle Stetz. The site maps each letter on your keyboard to a sample from a drumkit. You type something in the box---your name, "Hi Mom," a dark secret from your past---and you've made music. Somehow, pretty much anything ends up sounding decent. With patience, things can even end up sounding good. Here are two nice examples.
You can use parentheses for faster triplet rhythms, and Stetz recently added a secondary set of electronic samples for people to play with, but other than that, the offerings are refreshingly limited. Stetz says he'd initially planned a huge feature list---multi-tracking, different tempos, symbolic notation for changing rhythm---but decided to scrap them for simplicity's sake. "I wanted this to connect with people who don't see themselves as musicians," he says. To his great credit, the site leaves very little room to feel intimidated. You can't really mess it up.
Applications like GarageBand have done an admirable job making music creation easy. Indeed, if you think about the original formulation of computers being "bicycles for the mind," music-making software is one of the great success stories. Typedrummer is an example of just how accessible musical interfaces can be. Built around something everyone already knows how to do, it almost tricks you into a creative act. It's like a digital harmonica, except it transforms typing instead of breathing.
The link has been shared widely around the web, and Stetz has been delighted with the response. "It's such a simple little site, but it gives people a chance to create something they never thought they'd be able to," he says. Even if that's overstating it a bit, giving people opportunities to make things---even small, inconsequential things---is always worthwhile. Sure, Typedrummer is more of a middle-of-the-workday diversion than a fabulously expressive instrument, but who cares? You might call it snackable creativity. Instead of filling our idle moments with mindless consumption, wouldn't it be better to fill them with mindless creation?
