musiciate text → music

How it works

1. Write something. Type a word, pick an emoji, or paste ASCII art.
2. It becomes a grid. A word is first drawn in a small 5×7 pixel font, and each emoji has its own hand-drawn shape. With ASCII art, every character that isn't a space becomes a cell.
3. Rows are pitch, columns are time. The top line is the highest note. Each column is one step, a 16th note. Characters side by side join into one held note when Sustain runs is on.
4. Rows follow a scale. Pentatonic is the default, so any shape sounds musical. Try major, minor, blues or chromatic, and pick a key.
5. Press Play. The letters fall into place, the notes form, a 1-2-3-4 count-in plays, and the roll is performed on the instrument you chose.
6. Add more if you like. Turn on drums, change the tempo, or switch on Loop. You can keep typing while it plays and the music changes as you go.

Tips: lines that slope make melodies, tall columns make chords, and gaps make silence. Your name has a tune too.

About musiciate

musiciate started with a small question: what does a word look like, and what would it sound like if you could hear its shape?

Type something and it gets drawn on a grid. Each mark becomes a note. Higher on the page means a higher pitch, and further along means later in time. A word gets an outline, a drawing gets a rhythm, and somewhere between the two you find an expression of it you hadn't noticed before.

Every word has a shape. Every shape has a sound.

Nothing here is composed for you, and there's no right answer. Your name, a heart, a row of slashes: each one plays back as itself. Some of it is lovely, some of it is strange, and all of it is true to what you wrote.

We made it to play in the space between language, art and music, and to look at expression from a slightly different angle.

musiciate is a project by Boston Sense, part of the Sense Labs experiments: small tools that model how art, music, language and expression flow into one another.