Monday, 15 June 2015
I wrote about Scroll-o-Meter, an unusual Chrome extension that keeps track of how far your finger travels each day, a couple of weeks back. Now here’s an even more brain frazzling experiment from the same team: Jazz.computer.
Created by developer and musician Yotam Mann and designer Sarah Rothberg, the site features a song that changes according to the speed and direction of your scrolling.
You actions affect the instruments, effects, tempo, chords and which sections of the song play. At the top of the page the song plays at 130 bpm, at the bottom its a more funereal 65 bpm. The arrangement changes with the tempo.
There’s a full description here of how Jazz.computer works. It uses a Markov Chain to transition between chords and once you hit a certain point in the scroll it flips them.
If you want to mess with the song even more, you can fiddle around under the hood here with controls for the visuals, effects and instruments.
The whole thing is powered by Mann’s Tone.js Web audio framework and Three.js for the visual elements.
Warning: Once you get started you may be there for some time. This one is a serious productivity killer.
Read next: Scroll-o-Meter Chrome extension turns all that scrolling you do into a game
