Filed under: Audio, Fun, Kids, Freeware, Time-Wasters, Web
Tonematrix makes music-making easy and fun - Time Waster
by Jason Clarke May 12th 2009
Tonematrix by AM Laboratory is a very fun and easy-to-use music sequencing toy. It's a 16 x 16 grid of grey boxes, and clicking in a box will turn it on. Boxes that have been turned on go white, and you will quickly see that each line of boxes has its own individual tone.
You can very quickly just click and drag all over the place to get a fast sense of how Tonematrix works, but the fun is in actually arranging your notes in a way that makes sense. Luckily, it's easy to make music that sounds good because rather than using a major or chromatic scale, Tonematrix uses a pentatonic scale. You may have noticed that if you play only the black keys on a piano, it's fairly easy to play something that sounds nice - that's because together the black keys make up a pentatonic scale.
What fun is making some music if you can't save it and come back to it? The makers of Tonematrix agreed, and built in the ability to copy and paste a series of comma-separated numbers representing each individual composition. For example, if you copy the following sequence of numbers and right-click on Tonematrix and choose "Paste", you will hear my first composition with Tonematrix:
36896,32772,33280,36868,32896,32772,33280,32788,16420,32768,33286,8192,32900,32768,16966,32768
Paste your favorite composition in the comments, and let's have some fun!
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
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The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
