Music Box - Whitney Music Box

Whitney Music Box

Along with the classical Music Box, a virtual form has emerged as the Whitney Music Box, named for computer animator John Whitney and invented by programmer/musician Jim Bumgardner.

This web application displays dots arranged in a chromatic scale spinning incrementally faster as they travel up the scale with the slowest dot cycling every three minutes. These dots move across a stationary line and activate a note to represent its place on the scale. The notes can be arranged with various sounds, frequencies, and keys. There are also settings for stereophonic and hand-cranked versions of the music box.

The visual layout of the spinning notes displays how, as chords are made, the whole form takes on geometric shapes. These shapes correspond to musical thirds, fourths, fifths, and so on. The hand-cranked variation allows the user to stop the animation and examine which notes are being activated.

Read more about this topic:  Music Box

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