LudoTune, a 3D music sequencer in the browser
ludotune.com
ludotune.com
Here’s my newest creation https://go.ludotune.com/hui4
It’s a neat game. I wouldn’t call it a great tool because it’s impossible for me to interpret the music from the blocks themselves without playing it. That being said I’m sure that wasn’t the original intent of the app!
2D info is much easier for me to decipher.
But, of course, like you, I assume that's not the goal so it doesn't matter. It is cool and it is fun and that's all that's important.
And I'm very impressed by this example! garrettjoecox did a great job.
https://music.apple.com/en/album/mad-world-feat-k-j-apa-cami...
It seems to be the version that they sample from in meme videos on YouTube and TikTok where they try to express a feeling of sadness either in honesty or ironically. Where they put the video in grayscale mode and put the part of this song over it that goes “all around me are familiar faces, worn out places” and so on.
They also use the song The Song of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel for this same purpose.
https://music.apple.com/en/album/the-sound-of-silence/192480...
This latter one is the one that goes “hello darkness my old friend” and so on.
What was your original intent with this project? I feel this would work very well for educational aspects, slightly comparable to sonic-pi, especially when it comes to how easy it is to make something nice.
Couple of questions:
1) Have you thought about split view? Split view would be nice (front and back), hard to follow the playhead through the loop otherwise as it becomes hidden halfway through.
2) What do you think about some kind of piano roll? The way you encode pitch into color with a keyboard works but it's a little incompatible with the piano roll idiom conventionally used in most DAW software. Would be very cool to have a 3D piano roll.
Kinda reminds me of fugue machine https://alexandernaut.com/fuguemachine/
Great job!
Win10, FF 91.0.1 64-bit
Stutters at ~24 seconds, ~32, maybe 1:30ish, 5 seconds after that... then I lost track. Not very often but when it does it's very jarring. Happens if it's running in the foreground or background, even if I'm not moving around or anything, just listening with tab in focus.
I think it should run smooth because I can play minecraft at 1440p at around 100 fps.
For me the Mad World one stutters before a single note is played: the repeater/clock seems to run, then stop, then "catches up", then stutters again, then one cycle smooth, etc. Sometimes notes are also just skipped, or only the last part of the soundbite is played.
I looked at cpu usage and it pegs a single thread to about 90% so maybe that explains it.
I have given up on any Web Audio that is not a single AudioWorklet with some kind of self contained wasm ugen
I'm glad we have cars because sometimes I just want to get from A to B fast. (Maybe someone just wants to enjoy making some light music through a fake book or light up keys.)
Other times, I enjoy hiking half a day because you see a lot of interesting things along the way, and the experience itself is rewarding for other reasons. (Like, conquering a challenging etude works my brain in a certain way and is satisfying.)
Tons of people will opt to make music via the easier option. But many will still try the difficult path, because it is rewarding and your skills compound over time.
And sometimes, a person who first does it the easy way decides that he/she wants to do it the harder way. People like to learn!
You can make getting from A to B easier (and faster), by replacing walking with cycling. You make it even easier with a bus, and easier still with a car. In some circumstances, this is valuable and should be welcomed. But it's a mistake to think that moving from A to B in a car is actually the same experience as doing so on foot.
I'm suggesting that this might be true of making music also.
No, it isn't, because unlike with getting from point A to point B, the end result isn't always the same with music making.
Music, in that aspect, is more like writing code or visual arts. Printing and photography becoming widely available didn't make visual arts worse, they did the opposite, because instead of focusing on just technical proficiency, the art was forced to move in a more creative direction.
With programming, us not punching cards with code and not using assembly as the primary language didn't make things worse, it just allowed us to go on a higher level and create things that would be unthinkable without that.
Same with music making. Being able to record a virtual orchestra in your bedroom studio doesn't make music as art worse, it opens up way more room for things that weren't even possible before. Just by definition, when it becomes much easier and really accessible to record something in your bedroom, which previously only a few extremely rich people in the world with tons of experienced staff could do, it allows for art to evolve faster and move forward just by the sheer drive of all the people who now have access to contribute to it.
However, the path that Reich did actually follow underscores the senses in which making music is so often a social activity, and there is no doubt based on interviews with Reich that having/choosing to work with other human musicians changed the evolution of his music. Not everyone likes his music, and of those who do, some might have preferred the direction it might have gone had Reich been an Ableton Live user. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that music as a social activity is critical to almost all good-to-great music, and that contemporary technology frequently undermines that.
[0] perhaps paradoxically, I am the author of just such a piece of technology.
Agreed on it being a social activity, but disagreed on contemporary approaches undermining the social aspect of it. Sure, it gives you an option to be more asocial when it comes to making music, but it also gives you ability to be more social than ever before.
Ableton Live has a remote collaboration feature now, so you can work on music together with people who are thousands of miles away from you. Quite a bunch of software solutions are available that make jamming together and recording music with people separated from you (by distance) easy and fun. Something like Splice Studio[0] is a godsend for remote DAW sync and collaboration.
While it was before my time, I'm sure the development of synthesizers and sampling audio tracks were considered by some to be shortening the travel-time between A and B, but those became influential in modern music. Maybe this isn't the next big thing in music, but it could be, and I'm curious to see how far it can be taken.
Pretty fun!