Tableau Piano Chart

tableau_piano_chart

Ever since I got to wait for my son during some of his piano classes, I became fascinated by the relationship between music and math. There are so many mathematical concepts in play when playing, writing or even listening to music. One day, I hope to create a way to convert any dataset represented in a chart into a good sounding musical tune (there are many topics to address to make the music sound good, I will perhaps elaborate on some later post..), but for now, I was able to create a Tableau Piano Chart.. Using standard charting techniques in Tableau and an inventive dataset, I got the keyboard look and then set off to write a javascript implementation that will play a sound onMarksSelection…

I was able to find some great piano notes sound files and used the DOM audio object to play a sound whenever a markSelection event fired on the dashboard, passing the relevant note to the function using Tableau JS API. I tried the piano chart on my laptop, and all was well! I then tried it on my iPhone, and alas, it looked good, but was silent.. As it turns out, iOS Safari has a different implementation of the audio object and much of the standard functionality supported on desktop browser is not available.. Getting the sound to play on my iPhone during a tableau marks selection event became quite an adventure, but I finally got it to work! Matt Harrison WebAudioAPI helped me through it. While not 100% perfect, it works well enough, and I can now enjoy a fully functional piano chart in Tableau on my computer and iPhone as well.. Enjoy!

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