'rhythmonics' is a portmanteau of rhythm and harmonics and, true to its name, is a music toy meant to show the relationship between polyrhythms and harmony.
See a video demo of the app here!!
This project is an interactive GUI that visualizes polyrhythms and allows a sliding scale of speed to auditorily and visually show how harmony is just really fast polyrhthms!
An understanding of overtones/harmonics and of polyrhythms is useful but not required. This interactive toy is meant to make the concepts intuitive and palatable just by graphically playing with it!
This application has fast and strobing movement and may trigger epilepsy for those with photo-sensitive epilepsy. Future versions will have an option to minimize movement but this is not available now.
This is a Python project and requires Python 3 to run. These installation instructions should work for MacOS with the default shell.
Open a directory on your computer that you want to download this repository to and clone it from GitHub from the command line with:
git clone https://github.com/msabin/rhythmonics.git
In the directory you've placed rhythmonics, it is recommended you create and activate a virtual environment to make sure rhythmonics uses the right versions of the libraries it was created with:
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
With an active virtual environment, use the requirements.txt file here to install all the libraries that rhythmonics depends on:
pip install -r requirements.txt
The main event loop that powers rhythmonics should be ready to run now:
python3 main.py
There are four files of Python code that organize the code's components as follows:
main.py
Run the main event loop for the rhythmonics program.
harmonics.py
Module for simulating all harmonic components: sound, polygons, balls.
interface.py
Module for the GUI of rhythmonics, wrapped in a console aesthetic.
config.py
Global constants (mostly colors) for the program to use.