ONLY WORKS WITH EDGE (bug !)
git, go version => 1.23 and npm version >= 18 are needed
git clone https://github.com/thomaspeugeot/phyllotaxymusic.git
cd phyllotaxymusic/ng-github.com-thomaspeugeot-phyllotaxymusic
npm i
ng build
cd ../go/cmd/phyllotaxymusic
go build
./phyllotaxymusic -unmarshallFromCode=data/music.go -marshallOnCommit=data/music
launch your browser to http://localhost:8080/
should compile on mac, pc and linux.
You use phylotaxy music, a web application, for generating a music theme. A music theme is a small suite of music notes, a melodic material.
A wellknown theme is at the start of Bach's 2nd fugue in C minor.
By turning knobs in the webapp, you generates a musical theme of your own. You can hear it in the app (by way of a simple webaudio synthesizer).
If you want to compose something more elaborate, you can export your theme to a musicxlm file. musicxml is a standard format recognized by lot of score editing software (including musescore).
Phylotaxy means "shape of leaves". It is the science developped by botanist, mathematicians and physicists to understand why plants have the shape they have.
Those guys have fun jobs.
In the office of Stephane D., a "spiral plants" specialist I visited, the shelves are full of beautiful dried specimen that people sent to him from all over the world. Each plant has spectacular spiral arragenements of leaves that run upward the trunks.
A common spiral plant is the pinecone.
Stephane taught me that when the trunk grows, the cells at the stem divide themselves. New cells end up building the trunk but regularly, one of them differentiates and becomes a leave. Because this happens on a regular tempo, the leaves arrange themselves along the trunk in spiral patterns. Stephane pointed out that if you draw a curve around the trunk to isolate one leave cell from newer leave cells, you end up drawing the "front curve" of the plant growth.
Stephane then compared a new leave cell to the last one. Because leave cells appear regularly, a new cell is always located with the same distance above and the same angle sideway, a rotation near 168 degrees, related to the golden ratio. Therefore, the "front curve" has this interesting geometric feature : but on the new leave cell, it overlaps itself after an upward translation and a rotation. Let's demonstrate this.
Use a grey pen and draw the unfolded the front curve on a piece of paper.
Use a green pen and draw the same curve at the right of the first.
Draw it again on a tracing paper with a red pen and put the tracing paper above and shift it a bit to the right and a bit to the top.
We did it ! The overlapping is perfect except for one space that have the shape of an eye ( the place for the leave).
Now take take the first drawing and add a canevas of vertical measure lines and horizontal pitch lines.
For the pitch lines, the spacing between pitch line follows the scale of your choice. If you choose a C minor scale, the tone differences between notes are 1, 1/2, 1, 1, 1/2, 1 and 3/2.
Now, along the front curve, when it intersect the measure lines, draw some notes of your choosing.
You now have created a musical theme.
It happens that a musical theme is suitable for polyphonic harmony, a canon for instance, if it has some properties. A polyphonic theme is played twice. The second time the theme is played, it is played with a shift in time and a shift in pitch (a fifth for instance). The whole is harmonious.
TBC
The idea of phylotaxy music is to generate a front curve from botanical parameters and to generate the notes of a musical theme from this curve.
MusicXML