Musical Tilings

What?

Tilings and tesselations are beautiful, amazing objects of mathematics. For our purposes, a tiling is a collection of tiles (polygons) in a two dimensional plane without gaps or overlaps. When you have a systematic way of assigning musical pitches to each of the tiles, it becomes a Musical Tiling. Such a Musical Tiling is like a keyboard instrument, full of buttons that can be pressed to produce a pitch. This website allows you to explore and experience some different Musical Tilings.

How?

The next page of this website has many unusual musical keyboards. They are interactive and have different settings to play with. Try the wrench icon in the upper right corner. Make sure your volume is turned up to a level you can hear.

If you have a touch screen, try pressing the tiles on the screen to play a note.
If you have a mouse, try clicking the tiles to play a note.
If you have a typing keyboard:

Try holding the space bar while clicking tiles to sustain notes.
Sustain several notes, press a letter key, and release them. Now that letter key will play the chord.
Try pressing the arrow keys to transpose the entire keyboard at once.

Some Tilings are better in landscape orientation than portait or the other way around. Smaller touch screens benefit greatly from the full screen mode. You may want to adjust the size of the tiles to your fingers and screen. No settings are saved. To get back to the defaults simply reload the page. Tiles assigned to pitches beyond the range of the synthesizer are removed. Note that you can connect a Novation LaunchPad Mini to have a tactile interface for the grid based Musical Tilings. MIDI output is available so that you may connect to your favorite synthesizer.

Why?

This website turns your phone, or tablet, or laptop into a musical instrument.

Different Musical Tilings help you to see different patterns in music. They open you up to new creative inspiration and musical thoughts. They help you make new connections between musical concepts.

Consider the influence of the instrument on which scales, chords, glissandos, and songs are easy or hard to do. Take scales for example. It might be easy to play a chromatic scale on a guitar string and difficult to play a C major Scale. While a piano makes it easy to play a C major scale but not the chromatic scale or some other major scale.

Consider the influence of the instrument on your ideas about musical concepts. Take intervals for example. It might be easy to remember the interval name "Fifth" when it is (usually) the fifth white key from some other white key on a piano. Yet, on a guitar it may be puzzling why it should be seven frets away instead of five.

Some Musical Tilings have fewer chord shapes to memorize than others.

Why not play around on some different Musical Tilings to test and expand your understanding of music in general?

To experience and compare many different Musical Tilings, it might cost you a lot of money and time, if it is even possible. Do you really want to retune a guitar over and over again? Can you justify spending thousands of dollars on a C-System Chromatic Button Accordion? Where can you even buy a Janko Piano? Did you hear about some excitingly different musical instrument only to discover that the company just went under? Through the magic of software and touch screens, this website makes many instruments available to you in a conveinent and comparable way.

You have finished reading, now try it!