Ohio is still a piano
In a hundred years, no one will remember our work. Strike that, make it about five years. Digital, web-based work can break or disappear in an instant. I’ve certainly done some things which are now gone forever.
Anyway, one broken thing was the crazy Ohio piano map I made nearly seven years ago, in which counties of Ohio were represented by the sounds of piano keys, and data became music of sorts. Actually, it’s not entirely broken; the sounds and most interactions work, just with a big, persistent gray error because Google Maps for Flash is no longer a thing.
Professor Robert Roth insists that this ridiculous map is vital to the teaching of cartography, and who am I to stand in the way of education? So I dug up the old laptop that had the only copy of the Flash map’s source code and set about recreating the map in more modern HTML and JavaScript. It doesn’t have everything the old map has, but hey, it works. Bonus: now the code can actually be seen, on GitHub.
It definitely does not work on mobile devices because playing audio elements on mobile is complicated and I don’t care enough, but if you’re on a desktop computer, here you go. Don’t touch this if you’re in a library or something without headphones. You’ll be embarrassed.
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