Occasionally something comes along about which all one can really say is, “Oh, that’s awesome!”—and perhaps, “Oh, I remember when the internet used to be for stuff like this instead of ruining the world!” The site that elicited this reaction from your correspondent this morning is called Musical Spirograph, and, well, it’s a musical spirograph.
The site presents itself as a series of eight concentric circles, each of which represents a single musical note. The default setup is a C pentatonic scale (C, D, E, G, A), but you can set the notes to be whatever you like—the site also has various presets to make your life easier. When you hit play, a little point forms lovely patterns that twist in and out of the various circles, and every time it crosses a given circle, the computer plays the corresponding note.
So how does it work? Well, like a real life spirograph, the patterns are formed by tracing the position of a point on a small circle as it rotates around the perimeter of a larger one. The resulting patterns are called epicycloids, and there’s some interesting math behind them that you can explore if you’re feeling particularly perky on a Monday. Otherwise, suffice it to say that if you rotate a little circle around a bigger one—either inside or outside it—and trace a point on the smaller circle, you get some cool patterns.
The Musical Spirograph is one of a number of “musical toys” created by Tim Holman, a man with a super cool website that links to all manner of other similar, non-musical projects. Holman’s “About” page for the project explains that he “[has] no real musical training, outside of a little bit of piano theory, so [he’s] also using it as a vessel for knowledge.” He invites feedback, so here’s some: the controls for the Musical Spirograph are a little cryptic, largely because you can’t see the circle on which the pen is mounted, so you can’t really see what adjusting the various parameters—“Outer,” “Inner,” and “Pen”—are actually doing. You can see the effect on the pen and the patterns it forms, but you’re kinda left guessing how and why those effects are happening.
But these are minor quibbles, and since this is an initial release, there’s probably more to come anyway. As it stands right now, this is a pleasantly DIY take on generative music—and by “generative music,” I mean the sort of stuff that Brian Eno has been making for years, not… Suno, or whatever. Ugh.