Twelve-Tone Toy Box
is a moderately large
is a moderately large
Java applet aimed primarily at musicians.
One
classic area of musical thought -- dodecaphony -- exploits clock
arithmetic (arithmetic in the ring of modulus 12). So this
applet attempts to make clock arithmetic visually vivid
for musicians, in an effort to make dodecaphonic ideas
easier to grasp.
The applet
runs well in Sun's AppletViewer, and runs okay but quite
slowly in Netscape Navigator 3.* for Macintosh (MacOS 7.*
doesn't make optimal use of time). Due to Netscape bugs,
the applet occasionally fails to load under Netscape 3.* and 4.* Beta 2 for
Windows 95 and Windows NT (the errors are in Netscape's
implementation of GIF import, apparently). I had to make it
download and import graphics one at a time, because Netscape's
Windows implementation of multiple simultaneous graphics imports
seems to run out of memory and violate Java machine integrity,
issuing spurious "wrong data type stored in array" errors.
The applet has been tested successfully under Microsoft
Internet Explorer for Windows, but I'm hearing of
load failures under MS IE on Macintosh.
When you start the
applet, a black screen appears with some pink text. At
this point, just a shell has been loaded; the shell then
attempts to load and run the rest of the Java code.
Once the rest of the
Java code is loaded, a yellow screen appears with red
writing.
At this point, the applet attempts to fetch its sound files
and graphics files (it's at this point that Netscape for
Windows sometimes errors). It should remain in this
state for no more than 5 minutes, I think -- if it continues
in this state for more than 5 minutes, it has probably
failed to load at such a low level in the Java implementation
that it doesn't even know it. You could try bookmarking the
page, quitting the browser, and starting over. Sometimes
Netscape for Windows freezes or bombs the entire OS at this
point--but all the applet is doing at this point
is writing text on the screen and importing GIF files.
When the applet finishes
loading, it displays its About screen.
The buttons on the About
page lead to three other pages, each of which has buttons for
the others.
For now,
I'm pre-loading the applet with the tone row from the Berg
Violin Concerto. But this is reset to a chromatic scale
every time you use the TAKE THE TOUR button on the About page.
This tour
demonstrates most of the capabilities of the applet
and lasts about
18 minutes.
Gems 5
is an introductory article on dodecaphony.
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