Tone Matrix

April 5, 2009 12:14 PM

Tone Matrix.
posted by slater (37 comments total)

I love music toys. I'm Brian Eno!
posted by Nelson at 12:27 PM on April 5, 2009

sine me up! good fun.
posted by the aloha at 12:28 PM on April 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Tony! Toni! Tone!
posted by box at 12:39 PM on April 5, 2009

Oh, that's lovely. Just the right balance between simplicity and producing something that sounds worthwhile. Needs 'Game of Life' mode.
posted by Devonian at 12:45 PM on April 5, 2009

Tenori-on!
posted by aubilenon at 12:45 PM on April 5, 2009 [4 favorites]

very cool.
posted by stargell at 12:48 PM on April 5, 2009

Ooo.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 12:50 PM on April 5, 2009

Yay! I still want a Tenori-On (I totally fell in love with it when I saw it being demo'd at MUTEK in Montréal last summer), but this will do for now.
posted by LMGM at 1:22 PM on April 5, 2009

I love making music with pattern sequencers and controllers. Other hardware and software options that might interest readers.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 1:28 PM on April 5, 2009

Heh, you could feed the NYT crossword into this and get a little soundtrack.
posted by jedicus at 1:46 PM on April 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Give me this in a box and it's the answer to my question.

Exactly.
posted by odinsdream at 2:04 PM on April 5, 2009

Needs Tetris mode.
posted by odinsdream at 2:13 PM on April 5, 2009

I started plugging in the black spaces of the old New York Times crossword puzzles I had lying around.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 2:14 PM on April 5, 2009

Does this thing require Flash 10? I see nothing except "please install flash player". I'm running Flash 9 (within Firefox 3.0). If this does indeed require Flash 10 ... Bad programmer! Lazy programmer!
posted by intermod at 2:20 PM on April 5, 2009

intermod: to be fair to the programmer, they did include a lot of awesome in this thing. There's probably a lot of Flash 10-only awesomeness functions, or something.
posted by odinsdream at 2:25 PM on April 5, 2009

here's one I thought came out well
posted by rubah at 2:31 PM on April 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Proof that major pentatonic noodling with delay always works musically.
posted by 5imian at 3:01 PM on April 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

odinsdream:

Yamaha is making something.
posted by 5imian at 3:02 PM on April 5, 2009

Oh yes. also

This is a free download. Very cool. similar. More customizable.

from this genius. He worked on the DDR franchise (among other things), and is an expert programmer and audio wizard. Super nice guy too.
posted by 5imian at 3:09 PM on April 5, 2009

odinsdream:

Yamaha is making something.

Ahh oops i see this was mentioned multiple times.
posted by 5imian at 3:11 PM on April 5, 2009

So awesome. It would be perfect if it had a moving vertical line indicating the progression of the tones, to make dynamic changes in the music easier to coordinate.
posted by Rhaomi at 4:12 PM on April 5, 2009

Look at me, I'm soma.fm!
posted by Pastabagel at 4:35 PM on April 5, 2009

I just gradually lit up all the little matrix boxes until it was completely lit up. It gradually went from Brian Eno, to Autechre, to the Ventian Snares. Then my friend yelled at me to turn that shit down, and Firefox froze up from Flash overload, making me 'Force Quit' the browser. And that is how I won the game.
posted by dgaicun at 4:50 PM on April 5, 2009 [6 favorites]

I did the same thing, dgaicun! As soon as I started clicking on the squares, I knew I was going to have to click each and every one.
posted by orme at 5:58 PM on April 5, 2009

Oh man I love these things!
Now I'm gonna go play with the Whitney Music Box for a few hours. Good night.
posted by robinhoudt at 6:51 PM on April 5, 2009

Just so you know, you can "paint" the grid by clicking and dragging across multiple squares. Makes highlighting the whole shebang much easier.
posted by Rhaomi at 2:16 AM on April 6, 2009

Major pentatonic noodling is civilization!
posted by tehloki at 5:35 AM on April 6, 2009

Thanks - this is lovely fun.
posted by Cantdosleepy at 8:27 AM on April 6, 2009

Also, previously, hobnox audiotool is mega-ace if you've a fast computer.
posted by Cantdosleepy at 8:38 AM on April 6, 2009

Wow this is awesome. So easy to do a quick scribble then slowly add extra notes and end up with something really nice.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 10:05 AM on April 6, 2009

holy crap this is cool. thanks.
posted by madh at 1:47 PM on April 6, 2009

Is there a VST or similar plug-in that will let me do this with my DAW? This is too much fun to stay web-only.
posted by lekvar at 3:14 PM on April 6, 2009

Cantdosleepy: hobnox audiotool is apparently what's driving this thing.

I tried this at work where I don't have a soundcard (stay with me here) and the thing completely flipped out. Shitty framerate because of our crap capture software at work. What it looked like though was that the second column was stuck. Any other boxes just lit up and were never pulsed by the timeline. The second column would get stuck on, and if you turned enough of them on the on-state would spread organically through the entire board. If you then hunted for one and toggled it back off, the whole thing went into conway convulsions.
posted by odinsdream at 3:22 PM on April 6, 2009 [1 favorite]

Dammit, Internet. Here I am with a nice fat tax rebate and you go show me something like the Tenori-On. You know I have poor impulse control when it comes to bleeping, flashing gadgets.
posted by rifflesby at 5:34 PM on April 6, 2009

Amazingly simple and beautiful.
posted by Lighioana at 9:58 AM on April 7, 2009

I've been playing with this ever since it was posted on Sunday, and I've really been enjoying it. I've uploaded one of my "performances" to YouTube. I'm not a musician, so I'm sure the performance is riddled with rudimentary timing and structure mistakes, but I think you guys might enjoy watching it anyway:

Rhapsody In The Blue

posted by Ian A.T. at 2:49 AM on April 9, 2009 [1 favorite]

See also: Hobnox Audio Tool
posted by tybeet at 11:11 AM on April 25, 2009