Based on the intro I thought I was going to build a SimCity style city, then have it played as a song.

It's more of a way to display midi files, and some sliders that can suppress some of the data.

Not what I expected, but interesting on its own terms.

I hadn't heard of glitch.com before. Is it a common project site for these sorts of experiments?

It's a thing from tech blogger Anil Dash. You might have seen his post on Twitter verification: https://anildash.com/2013/03/01/what_its_like_being_verified...

Glitch is pretty neat: it’s sits somewhere in between something like Codepen and something like Github, with some nifty VCS features that new programmers don’t have to think about.

A Whole New World MIDI version, nice.

Hmm, uploaded a few midi files. It showed one building and then no buildings or anything at all below the play (stop) button. What kind of midi data is this expecting?

It seems to be expecting Type 1 MIDI files (with instruments on multiple tracks). It does well with those, but doesn't seem to split out notes by channel from a Type 0 file.

I got it to load one of my MIDI files, but the stock on they provide felt pretty glitchy. Do the sliders just affect the way the MIDI is visualized? Because it seemed to break the audio up on their default file, but didn't change anything with the MIDI I uploaded.

I just thought something was probably just broken on Firefox.

I also got this with a few files, with only one instrument, and low velocity. Try some songs with more "action" :) Still, calling it new songs, is stretching it, in my opinion :P