If you’re old enough, you might remember when game consoles were relevant enough for them to be the main way you and all your little hooligan buddies may have played video games. And, if you’re nerdy enough(or maybe not nerdy enough), you probably spent a lot of time in those console’s menus, just messing around.
If you used a Nintendo Wii, you probably remember that chime that would play whenever you were brought to the home screen, or if you mucked around with something like a PlayStation 2, you might recall those space-y wooshes whenever you loaded a game in or even just sat around in the main menu without a disc inserted.
There’s a good chance, that if you played on those old, now moldy consoles, you’ll remember not only the visuals they served you but also the sounds they played.
From the iconic startup sound of the original PlayStation to the timeless music of the Nintendo Wii, every great video game console had its own sound-scape. And this expands past consoles, even in desktop OS’, every little action from logging in, errors and alerts to simply changing your volume, had its own unique yet consistant sound. I mean, there’s like a 75% you’ve heard something like Windows XP’s error sound, or a Mac’s startup chime.
Every great interface greets you with not only good visuals, but good sound design, and here at yeet’s site, I strive to be no different.
And that, my friends, is why I am working on a way to embed a sound engine into this very website. But not just any sound engine, I want something unique. I don’t just want to play some background music, I want the music to be able to change with the page. Not only that, but I want the music to be more than just the same-old boring song played as an MP3 file in the background. At the very least, something like a jukebox. And, I think I have the perfect foundation: BeepBox
BeepBox as quoted from the website, “is an online tool for sketching and sharing instrumental music.” Not only that, but BeepBox is an engine of sorts, in the way that it does not play or stream sound from from any sort of audio file, but rather synthesizes music and even offers tools to do so.
The only problem? I don’t have a PC, and I sure as fuck don’t have acces to NodeJS. So… What do I do? BeepBox offers pre-compiled JavaScript(compiled to JS from TypeScript), to serve the website among other things. So, in a way, I do technically have access to BeepBox in pure, static webpage form, but with a catch: it is literally not designed like that. As shown in the link to the GitHub page I pasted earlier, It’s designed to be compiled to static JavaScript from TypeScript using NodeJS, and those tools are made with that design in mind.
So now, I’m at a fork in the road, I have 2 paths I can take:
Buying a PC would be good for overall bs but making my own tools will let me create something I know should work on anything that can at least run static web pages.
Anyways, this post kind of serves as an announcement that one day, when you open this website, you might be hit with some beebops in the background, and a concept for how those beebops might work.
~It’s Yeetsup, C.E.O. Of Tahiti Mangos, Inc.