Here’s a colourful keyboard find for you. Though you could argue it remains squarely in the ‘toy’ department, the concepts here are pretty cool.
OK, so you only have the C major scale to play with, but take a look at those coloured blocks above the keys. These make contact with circuitry inside the instrument and form a rudimentary sequencer. Check out the video below and you’ll see that placing the coloured blocks, each of which represents a different note of the scale, in different orders changes the melody played back.
What’s more, you can change the tempo and the pitch (to some degree) using the two sliders to left and right of the keyboard. We presume there’s at least two note polyphony as well, as it’s possible to play the keys while a predefined sequence plays back.
We get a strange sensation of being stuck in some late ’70s/early ’80s video game – probably of the space invaders ilk – and that’s no surprise given that it was created in 1978 by Mego Corp. Apparently it was even released in the UK, though I certainly don’t remember it.
What do you think?
