Tone Matrix is a really nifty little Flash app that lets you compose an awesome-sounding synthesized music loop in real-time using a giant grid. The x-axis represents timing. There’s 16 equal increments of time, giving you 4 beats at 4 notes per beat. The y-axis represents pitch, with each tile being a different note on a pentatonic scale. For those of you who don’t know what that is, basically it means no matter what combination of notes you play they sound good with each other. I’ll let the wikipedia link explain it in more detail if you are interested.
I know it’s more of a toy than a game, but these kinds of projects frequently lead to really nifty ideas being adapted in games. Just browsing through the comments I saw some people mentioning various games (Tetris, etc) that would benefit from an added mechanic of something like this. I know I was mesmerized by Tone Matrix for a good solid hour, and I’ll show most of my friends. It’s fun to draw a picture of something with the matrix and see what it “sounds” like. Thanks again to Scottae for sharing this.
TONE MATRIX URL: http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix
Have you seen it recently? It looks like he added a really cool visual effect to it.
Oh nice! That definitely does look cool! I’m still personally waiting for the “save a tune and send to your friends” feature. That’s going to make it ridiculously popular.
How about an export as ring tone?
This thing is awesome. I know there is a real life version of it that people like “little boots” on youtube use to make music. I can imagine tetris with this effect, and while that sounds pretty bad ass who can really turn down the classic tetris music?
Nice post, I look forward to reading some more.