Musical chairs

Taking the blame off the person at the stereo

Every game of musical chairs ends with somebody saying the music stopped when their cousin was next to a chair. They are usually wrong and it does not matter, because the suspicion is the problem rather than the truth of it. A screen that draws the moment in secret cannot be accused, and the person who pressed start does not know either, which is the part that actually settles the room.

The range is where the tension lives. Five to twenty seconds is a good party setting: long enough to get moving, short enough that nobody relaxes. Widen it and the rounds feel genuinely unpredictable; narrow it and everybody starts counting, which is exactly what you do not want.

Everybody fits

The classroom version of this game removes the chairs but never the children: each round has one chair fewer and everybody has to fit, sharing, sitting on laps where that is allowed, until eight children are balanced on two chairs and the whole room is laughing. Nobody is out, nobody sits and watches, and it is funnier than the original.

This page runs that version without any changes: keep tapping One is out to take a chair away, and simply do not remove anybody from the game. The counter says how many chairs there should be, which is the only number the room actually needs.

Made in the browser, not downloaded

The three tunes are built out of plain notes by the browser itself. There is no audio file on this site, nothing is fetched when you press start, and there is no way to add your own, which is a real limitation and the price of a page that loads nothing. If you want your own music, play it from wherever you normally do and set the volume here to nought.

At nought the screen becomes the only signal, and it says music on and music stopped in type you can read across a hall. For a passing game instead of a moving one, the hot potato tracks who is holding it, and the timer bomb is the version with a fuse.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.chairs.range, pph.chairs.tune and pph.chairs.volume, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.