musiciate text → music

Share this song

The link holds the whole song: words, sounds and beat. Anyone who opens it hears exactly what you made.

Video for Instagram & YouTube is coming in the next version.

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. The font changes the music. The same word in Bold plays fuller chords, in Italic the chords roll like a strum, Tall spreads it over more pitches, Wide slows it down, Dotted makes it light and staccato, and Mixed gives each letter its own style. The Octave setting moves everything higher or lower.
5. Rows follow a scale. Pentatonic is the default, so any shape sounds musical. Try major, minor, blues or chromatic, and pick a key.
6. 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.
7. Add more if you like. Turn on bass and drums, pick a style for each, or press 🎲 to make up a new bass line or beat. The bass follows the notes of your words, so it always fits. Add swing, change the tempo, or switch on Loop. You can keep typing while it plays and the music changes as you go.
8. Share it or take it further. Share sends a link that holds the whole song. Export MIDI gives you a file to open in FL Studio, GarageBand or any music app.

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.

We count visits and button presses anonymously, without cookies. What you type is never sent anywhere; it only lives in your browser and in the links you choose to share.