Boris Smus

Software Designer

Musical Mashups in Pure JavaScript

When I want to learn a new song on guitar, I often search for chords online. There are many sites that provide chords and tabs, and Google indexes them nicely. But the quality of chords is often poor, and there’s no way to submit corrections. When I ran a MoinMoin wiki, I kept my fixed versions of songs there. Even making modifications to existing chords was painful though, since it involved hand-editing a plain text file and ensuring that the chords were properly aligned with the lyrics. My preferred solution to this problem is to write a web application to facilitate easy collaborative editing of simple folk/rock/pop songs.

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Robotic Piano Playback

After several weeks of casual spare-time research and implementation, I’ve finally built a fully working piano playback robot. The usage is simple: someone plays or sings an arbitrary monophonic melody, and the robot, parked on a piano bench, will play it back.

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