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voices · as written

10 s · 100 bpm · a rising line over a steady bass

voices · as written 10 s · 100 bpm · a rising line over a steady bass
0:00 / 0:10
↓ wav ↓ midi

Two voices written as one grid — each row a voice, each column a moment in time. A lead climbs a major arpeggio while a bass keeps the pulse beneath it. The whole multi-voice arrangement is a single grid of numbers, read through a handful of parts.

↓ Download MP3 ↓ WAV (lossless)

A song’s voices are a grid

A melody is a line of numbers. Stack a few of those lines on top of each other and you have a grid — one row per voice, one column per moment in time:

# two voices, read across eight moments
lead:  1 3 5 8 · 1 3 5 8     # a major arpeggio, climbing
bass:  1 · 1 · 1 · 1 ·       # the root, keeping the pulse

Read each row through a voice and the grid becomes an arrangement: the lead steps up a major arpeggio — do, mi, sol, do — while the bass holds the root underneath. Two voices, sounding together, written as one block of data.

It’s the same idea the rest of the site is built on — a line of numbers read through a context — but now in two dimensions at once. Across is time; down is the voices that play together. A single melody is one row of this; a whole multi-voice arrangement is the grid.

And because the arrangement is just a grid, every move you’d make on one melody is available to the whole thing at once — including the simplest. Flip the grid end to end and every voice reverses with it: hear it reversed »