Magic Circle analyzes your piano play and instantly shows what notes and chords you are playing. Use it for improvisation, composition or fun.

DOWNLOAD Magic Circle for Mac OSX (488) | | Magic Circle for Windows (1295) source code Magic Circle source code (864)

Over the past weeks I have been working on an Processing sketch that helps you to play piano by giving you insight in what you are playing. It is based on the idea of the Circle of Fifths.

Show me!

A friend of mine, Freek de Graaf is a lot better at playing the piano so I conveniently used one of his arrangement to demonstrate the awesomeness of Magic Circle. Thanx Freek

Click here to view the embedded video.

About the Circle of Fifths

For those of you who have never heard of it: in the circle of fifths notes are arranged by an interval of 5 tones clockwise on a circle. So, if we start from C at the top, the next notes are G, D, A, E, B, F#(Gb), Db, Ab, Eb, Bb and F.

Musical relatives & key

Because of the way the notes are arranged on the circle, it has some pretty useful properties. Notes close to each other on the circle are musically related, i.e. they will probably sound good when played together. also, seven notes next to each other make up a scale. If we take the C note, the F on the left and the G, D, A, E and B we have all the notes on the scale of C major. Magic Circle shows these notes conveniently grouped into a tonic structure: all the notes in the current key with a white line around them.

Scale of C

Understand what you are playing

Often when you are improvising you do not consciously know what chords you are playing. Magic Circle helps you to get direct feedback on the structure of your improvisation. It can detect a number of different chords and will show you the correct names for them.

Take a look at some of the chords that are played in the video:

Visual cues for chord recognition

Because of the layout of notes, a certain chord always has a specific shape. For example, the minor and major triads have a squashed triangle shape and are mirrored versions of each other. Major 7th chords look like a trapezoid. Diminished and augmented chords are symmetrical squares and triangles. By playing the chords and associating the shapes with the sounds and emotional quality of the chord you can help yourself understand what you are playing.

Help by composing songs

Even better than only recognizing the structure in the music you are playing is teaching yourself the ability to compose music visually. Recognize the chords and link them to the emotional quality of the sound and then learn to recognize chord progressions as changes in the visual pattern. One chord resolves into another, sometimes sounding like going away (from C to Dm for example) or coming back home (G7 – C). These movements are directly related to movements on the circle, where going going away further from the tonic is also emotionally perceived as such and taking steps towards the tonic creates the feeling of resolvement.

In Jazz, chord progressions are often very regular / structured and will look like a series of steps counter-clockwise on the circle. Take for example the intro of the Realbook classic ‘Have you met Miss Jones’ by Rogers and Hart. The chord progression is as follows:

Cmaj7 – C#dim – Dm7 – G7 – Em7 – Am7 – Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7

The last part from Em7 is just working your way down the circle counter-clockwise until you end up at the tonic, in this case C.

And much more

There are many more uses of the circle in composing songs. I will try to write some posts on these different aspects while I learn more about composition myself. So please subscribe by email or with a news reader, or check my youtube channel for updates.

Features of Magic Circle

• Live visual representation of the notes you are playing
• A presentation mode for impressing your friends
• Live chord recognition of most western (Pop, Rock & Jazz) chords
• Change keys easily with a foot pedal (Midi channel C00)
• Display of overtones of the notes you play
• May change your life and the way you learn to play piano forever

Download

All source code to the Magic Circle processing application is freely available under the Creative Commons Non-commercial licence. Please feel free to make your own versions, improve upon my code, share your own creations and enjoy learning about playing piano!

Magic Circle for Windows (1295) (not tested!)

Magic Circle for Linux (123) (what do you think?)

For the adventurous, you can also download the source code. Use at your own risk, but enjoy, extend and share.

Magic Circle source code (864) (.zip, 5.6 MB)

You will need

Processing (for running the source code sketch)

RWMidi Library

A midi-enabled keyboard (you can even use a virtual keyboard if you don’t have the real deal)

Acknowledgments

I have been trying to learn the piano over a year now without taking lessons from a professional teacher. It has been quite an effort, but if you like to do something bad enough, you will find a way . I have mostly used the internet as my source of lessons, inspiration and teaching aids.

Magic Circle was inspired by the Interactive Circle of Fifths by Rand Scullard. Many thanks to him for his incredibly useful HTML implementation of the circle and his detailed explanation. I’d urge you to take a look at his site, it’s worth it!

My neighbour and friend Freek de Graaf who is a talented pianist and composer has given me the opportunity to test the system with somebody who can actually play and has given me helpful tips and advice. Thanks Freek!

A lot of tricks on playing Jazz paino have been given to me in MusicGuru12′s excellent online piano tutorials. Thanks man!

Wikipedia provides a lot of excellent articles on music theory. Especially the articles on chords, progressions, mathematics of music and modes.

Play and enjoy!

Learning an instrument for me is a combination of perseverance, fun, patience, the occasional frustration and a developing emotional binding with my instrument. I have played Cello for 14 years and I was up for something new, so I started to teach myself piano. And to learn you have to practice, practice, practice. Everybody knows that, but if you find a way to make this practice fun and engaging, you are already halfway there!

So let me know what you are doing with this little tool and I hope you will keep coming back for more info and insights from a budding pianist.

If you like (or love) Magic Circle, please consider donating $30 or a smaller amount to help me continue development of this little app.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Reading this insightful article on space in web design, I came across this inspiring start of a methodology for deciding what should be on a page and what should be left out:

Currently when a website is ‘optimised’ for mobile, iPhone and now, iPad, it’s slimmed down to its bare-bones — the essence of what makes it what makes it it. In these formats space is particularly valuable because there’s less of it. Normally these ‘lite’ formats are afterthoughts. We should be designing backwards from these formats, not the other way round.

Read the rest of the article on digitalmash.com

via @smashingmag

Can I represent this in paper?

Pollen Origami Key to Plant Sex

I don’t quite know where I am, but I am definitely not standing with my feet on the ground.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sharing screens in Skype is a useful feature, and you might even find some interesting side-effects from abusing it by making a screen shot of the shared screen, send it to the other and make a screenshot of him showing it and sending that, ad infinitum. You get the idea, a video feedback loop – bit of a convoluted way to do it, but who cares?

Anyway, notice the colour change towards yellow? Who is stealing my blue?!

Video Feedback, the easiest way to create fractals!

The past Sunday I visited Upgrade! #7 in Eindhoven. This event is part of a larger network that aims to bring technology and art together and give exposure to artists/designers/engineers/anyone really who aims to combine these in their work.

That night the stage was set for Tetsu Kondo, a Japanse artist in residence at MAD Eindhoven. He has spend over 10 years building his own instruments, both analog and digital. He introduced us to one of his digital instruments by giving a five-minute performance. The ambient style of his music came together beautifully with the minimalistic design of the visuals he created real-time, which was at the same time a representation of the music, an interface with which he controlled the music and a work of art.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The audience was eager to find out how exactly this interface worked and what programming language he used. Apparently, we were not the only geeks in the room . Tetsu explained the interface patiently in more detail (I wonder what his first impressions of a Dutch audience were…). The explanation of the design decisions he made during the creation of this instrument gave us an insight into the reasons for his art. He is fascinated by the world around him and tries to understand bits of it by creating some sort of representation of them in a language he can communicate with across cultures. Programming allows him to express the things he is fascinated with in music and visual compositions, a universal language.

I liked the open discussion during most of Kondo’s talk. It was interesting to see that the difference in cultures led to some confusion. It was not always clear what the other meant to say exactly, especially when entering the slippery roads of art criticism. At those moments, the visual beauty of Kondo’s work was the only thing we could all agree on.

I’m looking forward to the next Upgrade!

There should be a link here, but I can’t find Kondo’s website. Could this be due to the fact that he values his offline presence more, or because he uses an online alias?

So you see, by getting into all that Jazz music, I do notice that my knowledge about music theory is a bit sketchy. I especially have trouble counting quickly between different tones. I need this to figure out how to form a chord.

Say, I want to C Major chord. I know that I need the Prime, Major Third and Major Fifth for that. I just learned that to be C, E and G. I can recall this pretty quickly now, but that’s only because I have memorized the combination of root note and interval.

When I want to do the same thing in A# I start getting in trouble, because I don’t have a list for that in my head. This thing just doesn’t scale up! (and I’m lazy) There has to be some other way of doing these calculations quickly and use it as a basis for improvisation?

My strategy at the moment is trying to use semitones and give them numbers. That way, I can use my primary school algebra to get me my numbers. Afterward I will convert them back into notes. Let’s see how that should work:

An overview of all the notes in the twelve-tone scale

We have to memorize this table and then we can use it to calculate chords more easily.

Hmm, this sounds like a good task for this week.

During my search to better understand music, I came across an interesting article. I mean, why are there 12 notes in our scale anyway? Turns out, there seems to be a curious mathematical coincidence has given us a scale that is not perfect, but (apparently) as good as it gets. Check it out:

Twelve-Tone Musical Scale

“More musings on music theory my man!”, you say. Well, more will surely follow.

A historical talk by Richard Feinman which would eventually lead us into the field of nanotechnology.

A transcript of Richard Feinman’s talk

Wikipedia

I have been working on a nice little program called Elise in my spare time. You can use it to create beautiful fractals. Take this for example:

Stay tuned for more experiments while I try to get this code creature through alpha stage .