Hexpress
Hexpress is a collection of musical instruments for your phone. You can use it for learning, playing and composing music whenever you have the time - on train, while waiting in line and during boring meetings. Using headphones is strongly recommended for louder and better sound quality, and to not disturb others around you. The application has simple, colorful and clean interface designed to be accessible to young children.
While each instrument behaves differently in some way, in general notes are played by touching shapes on the screen, and sound is shaped by tilting the phone left-right and up-down. Different instruments have different effect controls - fade in, reverb, wah, tremolo…
Most of Hexpress instruments have unusual honeycomb note arrangement that’s sometimes called "harmonic table note layout". It has many interesting properties compared to standard piano layout:
- effective utilization of device screen (3+ octaves range)
- note relations (intervals) are uniform across whole range; to transpose song to different key just play same patterns on different part of instrument
- most chord shapes are grouped tightly and they can be executed with single finger swipe
- in typical scale and melody runs, notes are alternated between fingers of two hands, so they can be played with speed and precision
- large intervals are as accessible as smaller intervals
Besides honeycomb layout there are also instruments with conventional fretboard, and instrument for finger-drumming.
