I’m sure there’s more logic to it, but there are twelve notes in the chromatic scale, so six rows of four gets you two octaves. Also putting them in rows of four means you get a nice interval (a fifth?) if you go down vertically.
It didn't work for me either, but apparently one of the issues is that it assumes window.speechSynthesis is available which may be disabled via about:config > media.webspeech.synth.enabled.
I'm a big fan of digitpain (Jeffrey Scudder) and it is great to see him get airtime here. The tl/dr for Jeffrey is he make digital art, but first he makes his own digital tools to make that artwork.
For those that are new to him, be sure to browse to the top level (https://aesthetic.computer) and play around in the 'terminal'.
If you have a VR device, view Freaky Flowers in it.
you can use the up and down arrow keys in 'notepat' and press the '/' key to see the waveform output and increase or decrease the sample size to better visualize them
I was confused too, but another comment here links to a video demo. That gave me enough clues to realize that you start off in a "notepat" app in this "computer." You can click "notepat" to go back to a prompt. At the prompt, you can type "list" to list all the commands. (I noticed there are aliases as well, like if you type "help" you actually go to "chat".) The demo shows a few things you can do, and probably you're meant to explore the other apps to see how things work.
it doesn't work as well as you'd hope with a usb keyboard without n-key rollover (nkro), and because it doesn't eat control characters (but uses the control and shift keys for percussion), it has a tendency to tempt you to run unexpected browser commands by accident. did you know what ctrl-shift-a does in firefox? well, you do now
from the name i was expecting it to have some kind of pattern-recording and playback ability, which would make it possible to play music even on such limited input devices
the keyboard keyboard layout is not isomorphic the way the screen layout is; a purely horizontal keyboard layout for a whole octave (either a whole chromatic octave, maybe on the qwer tyui op() row, or just a whole octave of naturals like on a piano's white keys) would greatly diminish the problem with keyboard rollover
i think that, if you're doing an ortholinear isomorphic keyboard layout of 12-tet, especially for people to just mess around with rather than playing seriously, you might be better off with six notes per row rather than four. that way, perfect fifths like c/g are vertically aligned. on this four-notes-per-row layout, you instead have major thirds, which are not quite as desirable for people to stumble across as they're messing around. and fifths are kind of in the worst possible location, a knight's move. major thirds are still probably the second-best thing after fifths though
hey thanks so much for all the info, i will apply some of these concepts to 'notepat' - technically there is encoding ability like if you enter 'notepat twinkle' it takes you through a monophonic track and i have a little syntax for that - you can also 'tape notepat' to record a video - i really enjoy playing it on my tiny unihertz jelly star android phone which is part of the 4 buttons per row design
Isn’t the function of the application to compute aesthetic variations on inputs?
To be fair the video linked upthread clarified things for me by showing me the app’s full ambition. Like you, I at first thought the whole thing was the keypad app, and that they meant the name in the clunky sense of “it’s a computer, but it’s ‘aesthetic’ because of its glitch-retro style.”
