Atari 2600 Music Explorer
I've been working on a Javascript web app for exploring the Atari 2600 music palette. My goal is to provide musicians a way to visualize and identify in-tune notes and chords producible by the TIA chip. I felt frustrated looking at static diagrams with fixed tuning. I imagined better note relationships could be found if it was possible to tune the piano scale and make various adjustments.
My app overlays Atari notes onto piano notes by matching up their frequencies. The point is to tune the notes up and down for discovering relative tuning relationships. It also has a function for subdividing the piano into microtonal notes. If you have a digital piano that allows for adjusting the tuning, then you could actually play notes on the piano that are similar to the TIA note frequencies.
My app is in very early development so half the functionality isn't working. It's a 3rd version prototype, so the code is still rough. The UI will change as I figure out what the app is going to be. I'm building it in Javascript, because it's easy to build user interfaces in Javascript, and it's highly cross compatible. I'm hosting it on Github for reliable hosting that won't disappear.
I'm blogging about it to let people know what I'm working on and haven't fallen off the face of the Earth. It'd be nice to gather some friendly suggestions. It's tested in Chrome and untested in other browsers. It also requires a modern browser version. FYI: If you press UP/DOWN arrow keys in the A4 frequency field, the updating looks neat.
https://pizzatari.github.io/atari2600music/
Immediate TODO list:
- Add a circle of 5ths diagram and some geometry diagrams (updating)
- Finish the remaining options shown in the UI
- Fix the major chord detection routine
- Add detection for remaining chords
- Thoroughly validate my frequency and cent calculations are correct and use best known values
- Add a sound generator to play notes as a virtual piano
- Add an option to flip text vertically for printing the piano layout
- Think of more useful stuff to throw in
- Speed up the rendering (it's re-building everything on every change)
I got into this because I discovered a new interest in music theory and the piano after thinking about writing some Atari 2600 tunes. I had zero prior music experience, so I am still learning.
Edited by azure
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