Rifftide

A music-based video game visualizing sheet music as an explorable world.

People see radically different things when they look at sheet music. Some see the clear expression of an idea, reading it effortlessly. Others see a familiar symbology but struggle to interpret it. Still others see meaningless marks on a page. They are all right. Music is a language, to be spoken and heard, written and read, and as with any language, the spectrum of literacy is wide.

Music notation straddles the line between writing and drawing, description and graphic representation. It is spatial and temporal. Let us visualize our old friend that you thought you’d left behind forever, the Cartesian coordinate system, and drop it atop the sheet music. The vertical axis (y) is space, while the horizontal axis (x) is time. The higher-pitched note appears above the lower. The note played sooner appears before the later. Whether you can “read” the notation or not, you can put your finger on the marks and trace their path--the flow of the music.

What if you could jump into that piece of paper like something out of "