I was trying out the MikroPascal compiler demo and noticed that they had built-in library support for reading a PS/2 keyboard and for square-wave sound synthesis. So I wrote a tiny program to read the keys and play sounds using a PIC16F688 chip.

The keyboard I used was a French keyboard I found by the side of the road; the DIN connector I desoldered from an old dead Pentium motherboard; and the PIC chip was a free sample. So the whole project cost nothing. (Well, OK, it also uses an amplifier and speaker, but I already had those on my breadboard.)

Some of the special keys produce multiple bytes when pressed, so they become short musical phrases. I used two ("ImpÉc/Syst" and "Pause/Intrp") as the basis for a little improv.