Here’s a project I finished a couple of years ago, but never got around to posting.

It’s a way to visualize music differently to the standard notation. The notes are wrapped in a spiral fashion, with one rotation per octave. (e.g. all ‘C’ notes are at 12 O’clock)

There are a lot of benefits to seeing the music this way:

• You can see an entire orchestra “Cooperating” to make a chord, without having to read 6 sets of sheet music at the same time.
• It makes it extremely easy to see transpositions (they’re just rotations)
• Melodic inversion is just a mirror flip
• Notes played stay visible for a time as a ‘histogram’. This makes it easy to see the Key signature
• Different instruments (midi channels) are different colours. Can see contributions of each instrument to the whole

Here’s the github repo for the hardware version:

https://github.com/mechatronicsguy/SpiralMusic_Teensy

And just recently I decided to make a software only version, so I didn’t have to drag out the hardware each time. Here’s the github repo:

https://github.com/mechatronicsguy/SpiralMusic_python/blob/main/README.m