Music Toy Idea

I had an interesting idea for a musical sound-generation toy, inspired by Electroplankton. The gist of it is that there is a ”sea anemone” on the screen with 5 or so tendrils; at the end of each tendril is a loop that you can grab and pull with the mouse. Each tendril makes a unique sound/pitch, and when you pull a tendril further away from the body, it gets louder. When you let go, it slowly retracts and gets softer. There would be other objects in the scene that you could interact with, such as pins or fishing hooks that would prevent the tendril from retracting.

What would make it even neater is to use Chipmunk to have all of the pieces be physical bodies — a central mass connected by springs to the outer masses.

I wonder how long it would take to create such a toy using Rubygame 3.

Alas, the audio support in Rubygame is woefully inadequate, and messy as well. I don't want to bog myself down adding even more new features for 3.0.0, but I could restructure the Mixer module enough that it could be expanded in the future without breaking backward compatibility.

Previous post: Emacs tip: Using lisp expressions in replace-regexp Next post: Emacs: ruby-electric-return