Musical Solar System

The music of the spheres

A picture of notes, instruments, and musical notations arranged in a solar system.

Written in JavaScript for a Graphics Programming class project while I was in college, the program takes an original composition I wrote for a Sound Design class and visually represents it as a solar system. Each instrument rotates around the time signature. The measures (equal to the length of the loop) rotate around each instrument. The notes for each measure rotate around the corresponding measure. The rotation speed of everything in the system is calculated based on the BPM of the song. No full MIDI files are played, instead the notes are played dynamically based on their position: each measure plays when it passes the top of the instrument, and each note in a playing measure is played when it passes the top of the measure.

You can see it in action here and view the code at the GitHub repo.