💈 Close Harmony

Pac-Man makes a great deal of noise and tells you almost nothing.

The waka is the same waka on the first dot as on the last. The power-pellet siren says you are powered and then declines to elaborate — not how long, not how much you've burned, not whether the blue thing you're chasing is about to remember murder. Good players were trained to salivate for the exact Frightened duration on a board-by-board basis.

Hello my baby

A Maze of Death made the case that the ghosts were never your opponents. The maze is the opponent. Geometry does the thinking. The monsters are its hands.

Instruments, in other words. So we handed them parts.

Four monsters. Four voices. No accompaniment. Somewhere, a ragtime gal has just been asked to wait patiently by the payphone.

Chase sings bass and holds the root, because Chase never stops. Ambush takes the fifth. Vector gets the third, the note that decides whether the chord smiles or tightens. Coward puts the seventh on top.

Each voice fades in only when its owner is near. One voice is a tail. Two is a situation. Four is either the best Gambit of your life or the last four seconds of it.

After a while you stop hearing the chord got thicker and start hearing the fifth came in. Ambush. Ahead, not behind. The game is not telling you how scared to be. It is telling you who.

What distance means in a maze

The obvious radar is Euclidean, and Euclidean is useless in a maze.

Pac-Nerd uses geodesic distance: corridor to junction, junction to corridor, the route a monster can actually walk. It sees through warps, because the maze does. Near is not a line. Near is a path.

The board is a chord

Energizers are your safety net, and they only ever go away. Four of them at the start; by the endgame, none, and every remaining dot has to be eaten with nothing in reserve.

The quartet's chord follows that count. Four energizers: home, D7, the board in full color. Three: a drift outward. Two: minor, the lights dropping while your hands are full. One: dominant. Zero: the fifth gives way to a flat ninth. No safety left, and the chord knows it.

It never resolves while you're playing. It can't. Resolution is what happens after you pass the board.

The tonic only arrives when the last dot goes, in the same key as the start fanfare. Clearing the board is the cadence. Everything before that is a held breath.

The siren is a signal

When a power pellet goes off, a little 4-bit chip figure starts under everything and speeds up as the window burns down. Not a warning at the end. A clock the whole way through. The tempo is the timer.

When the monsters begin to flash, the figure flips direction, jumps an octave, and keeps tightening.

The lovely interval

Everything here is rooted in D and mostly behaves, which leaves room for one gleaming wrong thing.

Miss a fruit by a breath and it doesn't get away. It evaporates, which is worse.

That gets a pert tritone: the exact center of the octave, the old diabolus, with the dominant crowding it a semitone away and looking askance disagreeably. The two beat like a failing fluorescent. An unsatisfying pop, and gone.

It is for the board's purest little theft.

A note on who wrote this

The code is AI's, as usual around here. So is the music, which is stranger, because the composer cannot hear.

So the sound effects were written as music theory first and music second. Do the four voices spell the chord? Is the ninth really a ninth, or did it collapse into mud? Does the frightened figure accelerate, or merely claim to? You can verify all of that without ears.

As usual, the human was called in as a taste-tester, and came back delighted.

Come play. Annoy all the people around you. Don't worry, you don't need headphones. The sound switch is bottom right.