Projects
Tonemap.live turns pitch into color, helping musicians of all levels see and refine their intonation in real time.
Tonemap.live — Building a New Type of Practice Aid from the Ground Up
Tonemap.live began as an experiment: could I create a tool to identify intonation trends in my playing over time?
The first ChatGPT sketches were on my laptop: a Python proof-of-concept using aubio for pitch detection and matplotlib to visualize frequency drift over time. As an app on my laptop, it worked, but I realized that it wasn't very portable, and between App Store approval, downloading, installing, and maintaining, would have many obstacles to wider adoption.
So I started researching, and discovered it may be possible to implement in a browser. I used ChatGPT to work directly with the Web Audio API and JavaScript. I built an early HTML version using Aubio.js, which could analyze live microphone input. From there I moved to an in-file McLeod Pitch Method pitch analysis, and a universal web version started to come to life.
As the prototype evolved, I moved everything into Visual Studio Code with Codex, integrated it with GitHub, and connected it all to Cloudflare for hosting. Revisions and features are now much easier and faster.
ChatGPT also helped design the Tonemap.live logo: the 4×4 grid of colored squares representing the Tonemap grid.
The result is a single-page app that opens instantly, runs entirely client-side, and is private to your device. I've added transposition, a nice set of options for "stretch" tuning based on the Railsback adjustments, custom colors, and so much more.
What's next? Let me know what you'd like to see!
-Jeremy
