Google is celebrating electronic music pioneer Robert Moog's 78th birthday with a Google doodle of the iconic Moog synthesizer. Like many past doodles today's doodle doesn't just look cool, thanks to the Web Audio API, it's also a working synthesizer complete with a reel-to-reel tape machine for recording.
The Moog Google Doodle uses the nascent Web Audio API to create a mini Moog and power a mock reel-to-reel recorder. At the moment browser support for the Web Audio API is limited, but the doodle will work in most browsers since it falls back to Flash where the Audio API isn't supported (the doodle does not work in Internet Explorer).
To play the Moog, just click any of the keys so that it gains focus and then you can play using your keyboard. All the nobs are fully functional as well, just click and drag to change the settings. Hit the record button and you can save your songs and share them with others.
Behind the scenes the Moog doodle also uses Closure libraries and some CSS 3 for the design and custom fonts. Developers interested in how the Moog doodle works can check out the archived doodle page and peruse the Moog.js JavaScript file for full details (as with all Google scripts, this one has been optimized for file size; you'll want to run it through JSBeautifier or similar before you try to read it).
