United StatesA music composition / analysis tool. Create a tone row by clicking on the staff or the piano keyboard. Twelve Tone will automatically create the Prime, Inversion, Retrograde, and Retrograde Inversion Magic Square. Save your rows or pitch class sets of 1 to 12 tones, with its name, current P, R, I, RI matrix markings, derivation and preferred accidentals settings. Save and Share PDFs of the notation, magic square, circular diagram, and piano representation of the tone row or set. Drive your own software or hardware synth via MIDI to hear the instrument you want, or use the app's own acoustic piano. Twelve Tone lets you know if any notes are repeated by highlighting both notes. Press the play button and hear your set played back with your selected rhythm. Select what form(s) of the row you want played (once or looped); • Prime • Prime then Retrograde • Retrograde then Prime • Retrograde • Inversion • Inversion then Retrograde Inversion • Retrograde Inversion then Inversion • Retrograde Inversion Select the transposition interval and direction when looping playback. Hear the pitches as you mark them in the magic square. The marks indicate the row form in which the pitch belonged; Prime, Inversion, Retrograde, and Retrograde Inversion. Lock the square to avoid accidentally marking or unmarking notes, and erase the entire square with the touch of a button. Lock the prime row notation and transpose it to C to use the Absolute Pitch Method for labeling in the matrix. Comes preloaded with the following rows: Alban Berg's Lyric Suite Babbitt's Composition for Four Instruments Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra Op.31 Schoenberg's Piano Piece Op.33a Webern's Concerto Op.24 Webern's Piano Variations Op.27 Webern's String Quartet Op.28
Comprehensive, useful and easy to use
Patrick Kelly obviously knows music. The other apps which he develops are of the same high quality as Twelve Tone, which I have been using for several years. Twelve Tone is flexible and allows the musician (chiefly composer) to do most of the things which they need to in order to understand then write and manipulate tone rows. The interface, while being having a font which is a little garish, has all the navigation and feedback necessary for you to work with non-tonal music. It's a robust and solid piece of software; the developer is responsive. Despite the availability of so many parameters, Twelve Tone is neither cluttered (in appearance or use) nor confusing to get the most of. Control of parameters is always where you'd expect it to be and so on hand just when you need it. There are some particularly impressive features: the 'intelligence' such that enharmonic spelling is instant, accurate and automatic; the compactness and readability of the Magic Square; the way in which notating sharps/flats is integrated with note input/editing. In a compact and clean interface you can build and adjust the vast majority of things which composers ot atonal music need quickly and intuitively.
United StatesAt v1: Clunky…but lovable
Love the idea, I will use this for sure, and really appreciate the effort put in to make this. Its really convenient to be able to type in a row, and see the various forms in the Magic Square! This is also very useful when doing analysis. For me the interest is in composition. Printing it out is very useful. Thoughts for the developers: 1) In this current version 1, it has a very clunky interface. I am pretty sure (hopeful) that will change. 2) There is no “NEW” row option ("save as” is NOT elegant, at all). It can be included in the FILE menu, and also as a small button on the upper right corner. 3) No place I can find for setting up WHERE the sound will come out (if its “internal speakers” it works, but not if one has an audio interface it seems). Need some sort of “Preferences” to be able to set up things. I realize this is version 1, but since the developers are charging for this, the least that they can do is give us a place to set Prefs. 4) It would be nice to have some options to get rid of the HUGE note names above the staff!! Honestly, if someone is using this type of software, one can pretty safely assume that they can read music. Developers: please, at least make it an option to HAVE the note names displayed (it looks just awful and cluttered with them there) and defaulting to NOT have the names there. Looking forward to the next updates!
United States
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