Notepat – Aesthetic Computer | Hacker News Reader

Notepat – Aesthetic Computer

aesthetic.computer

176 pointsjustanothersys40 comments

Some more info

  https://github.com/whistlegraph/aesthetic-computer
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-7UszmI1K4
  https://aesthetic.computer/handtime
  https://digitpain.com/

I wasn't expecting that README

Refreshingly sadistic way of handling a project checklist, I love it

2600 lines long, and an additional 1700 lines of completed items moved to a different file: https://github.com/whistlegraph/aesthetic-computer/blob/main...

Ok, this is incredible in an infinite number of ways.

I love it!

I'd be fascinated to learn what inspired this absurd keyboard layout!

The notes go together by color and location. There's some scale logic there

I’m sure there’s more logic to it, but there are twelve notes in the chromatic scale, so six rows of four gets you two octaves. Also putting them in rows of four means you get a nice interval (a fifth?) if you go down vertically.

Thirds vertically. Semitones go horizontally.

The fifth is a knight's move away down, or up and to the left. Like other isomorphic layouts, it conceptually tiles infinitely in all directions.

if you tap the '-' key on ur keyboard it shows an overlay in red and green with the steps down and up which i've been using as a transposition aid

this still requires that you know how many semitones of interval you want

Angel helped make a kite. It was a huge surprise. Very cool program, not helpful to today's billable hours.

I played twinkle twinkle little star

u can enter 'notepat twinkle' after tapping notepat in the corner to actually run through that melody

Nice. If only there was a mario theme song.

I dig it. Made music for 10 minutes. Needs effects boxes. Like one on those looper echo things

I wouldn't mind being able to save patterns to play back and manipulate

Love this site. I know I've seen it before but all my histories are drawing a bl nk

doesn't seem to work at all on firefox, but works fine on a chromium-derivative.

a warning would've been nice about a lack of support? ^^

Windows 10 w/Firefox 130.0, ublock, privacy badger, and works ok for me?

I'm not the dev, but figured it might help them if they know more details. You on Linux, Win11, Mac, BSD, Mobile?

Linux + Firefox 129.0 here. Works fine for me too!

Android + Firefox, works ok.

works for me on MacOS 14.6 FF

It didn't work for me either, but apparently one of the issues is that it assumes window.speechSynthesis is available which may be disabled via about:config > media.webspeech.synth.enabled.

Love the chat functionality :)) Very cool.

this is nice. I love the scale layout

I'm a big fan of digitpain (Jeffrey Scudder) and it is great to see him get airtime here. The tl/dr for Jeffrey is he make digital art, but first he makes his own digital tools to make that artwork.

For those that are new to him, be sure to browse to the top level (https://aesthetic.computer) and play around in the 'terminal'.

If you have a VR device, view Freaky Flowers in it.

How are the wave forms generated?

they are generated in a web AudioWorklet on a per sample basis https://github.com/whistlegraph/aesthetic-computer/blob/main...

you can use the up and down arrow keys in 'notepat' and press the '/' key to see the waveform output and increase or decrease the sample size to better visualize them

freaky-flowers was cool. How does it work?

they are sculptures i made in the oculus browser using a webvr tool on the site

Uhm what is this?

It just dumps you into a retro-ish environment but it's not really clear what it's for.

I was confused too, but another comment here links to a video demo. That gave me enough clues to realize that you start off in a "notepat" app in this "computer." You can click "notepat" to go back to a prompt. At the prompt, you can type "list" to list all the commands. (I noticed there are aliases as well, like if you type "help" you actually go to "chat".) The demo shows a few things you can do, and probably you're meant to explore the other apps to see how things work.

this is a cool thing

it doesn't work as well as you'd hope with a usb keyboard without n-key rollover (nkro), and because it doesn't eat control characters (but uses the control and shift keys for percussion), it has a tendency to tempt you to run unexpected browser commands by accident. did you know what ctrl-shift-a does in firefox? well, you do now

from the name i was expecting it to have some kind of pattern-recording and playback ability, which would make it possible to play music even on such limited input devices

the keyboard keyboard layout is not isomorphic the way the screen layout is; a purely horizontal keyboard layout for a whole octave (either a whole chromatic octave, maybe on the qwer tyui op() row, or just a whole octave of naturals like on a piano's white keys) would greatly diminish the problem with keyboard rollover

i think that, if you're doing an ortholinear isomorphic keyboard layout of 12-tet, especially for people to just mess around with rather than playing seriously, you might be better off with six notes per row rather than four. that way, perfect fifths like c/g are vertically aligned. on this four-notes-per-row layout, you instead have major thirds, which are not quite as desirable for people to stumble across as they're messing around. and fifths are kind of in the worst possible location, a knight's move. major thirds are still probably the second-best thing after fifths though

there are more interesting isomorphic keyboard programs out there; https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.gitorious.jamesjrh.isoke... (https://github.com/lrq3000/hexiano) is one free-software implementation for android

i suspect the paucity of waveforms in notepat is due to the fact that the web audio api only has a few builtin waveforms, all of which suck. but with software synthesis it's easy to get really interesting musical timbres. https://za3k.github.io/ha3k-14-synth/ is a demo i did with za3k which generates a series of samples in js (using an html5 api that is unfortunately deprecated without any adequate replacement). i have more notes on bytebeat at http://canonical.org/~kragen/bytebeat/, but it can be hard to get it to sound the way you want; other more tractable but simple ways of getting nicer sounds include karplus-strong synthesis http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/ks-string.c (one-line version in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/ks1.c), flanging http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/sweetdreams.html, and fm synthesis http://www.codemist.co.uk/AmsterdamCatalog/

(disclaimer: i know nothing about music)

hey thanks so much for all the info, i will apply some of these concepts to 'notepat' - technically there is encoding ability like if you enter 'notepat twinkle' it takes you through a monophonic track and i have a little syntax for that - you can also 'tape notepat' to record a video - i really enjoy playing it on my tiny unihertz jelly star android phone which is part of the 4 buttons per row design

awesome! yeah, it definitely seems like it would be great on multitouch

love the project. made a blog post about it. why? so the seo gods give this project more eyeballs it deserves https://oransblog.com/aesthetic-computer/

Calling something 'aesthetic' as a direct adjective is not the correct use of 'aesthetic'.

Thank you for clarifying, CyberDildonics.

Isn’t the function of the application to compute aesthetic variations on inputs?

To be fair the video linked upthread clarified things for me by showing me the app’s full ambition. Like you, I at first thought the whole thing was the keypad app, and that they meant the name in the clunky sense of “it’s a computer, but it’s ‘aesthetic’ because of its glitch-retro style.”

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