ACTIVATE
Skip 10s
Reset
Max. period:
1.03125
B
Volume:
0.5
Tempo:
60
BPM
Pitch:
120
Hz
Attack:
0.02
Decay:
0.3
LP rate:
1
Inst. sweep rate:
1
Distortion:
0.1
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What
Imagine you have a note playing at a regular interval of 1s, and a different note playing a regular interval of 1.01s. If they start at the same time, then after one
beat
they will be 0.01s apart, and this delay between them will increase with every beat until the notes come back together after 100 beats. Let us call this a full cycle. If you now imagine many notes playing at slightly different intervals, then their syncopation can become quite complicated, and over a full cycle they trace out many melodies (all possible melodies, even).
This app lets you play with this concept. The main window consists of a grid of buttons.
The horizontal position of a button specifies the interval, with the left-most column being 1 beat and the right-most column being 1.03125 beats, and the 16 columns being linearly spaced between these 2 extremes.
The vertical position of a button specifies the note frequency. In the side panel, you can enter a list of allowed frequencies (starting with
1
which is the frequency specified by the Pitch slider) which are mapped to the buttons, repeating at higher octaves as needed to fill the 12 rows.
There are 2 buttons in the side panel:
Skip 20s: Allows you to skip forward 20s.
Reset: Resets the melody.
Below this there are 3 general sound settings, and below this there are 5 setting that control various properties of the instrument timbre. The one that really needs explaining is
Inst. sweep rate
ISR: Multiple versions of a wavetable are generated at the start of the program, and the instrument rotates through these wavetables as it plays, giving a nice chorus effect. ISR controls the rate of this rotation.