midicycles is a small tool written in Go that visualizes incoming MIDI notes. It was originally created to both hear and visualize output from Melrōse programs, but it also works with any MIDI source.
The project is simple to start and flexible to tune. On startup it opens one or more MIDI input ports and renders note activity in near-real time.
How it renders
Most MIDI events represent a Note-ON or Note-OFF moment at which a Muscial Note (by number) is started or stopped. The visualizer uses the MIDI number as the radius of a circle segment (bow). The angle of the bow increasing with the duration of the note. The visualizer can show multiple notes at the same time.
Using a configuration, you can control the display behavior such as:
- MIDI note range,
- clockwise,counter-clockwise
- assign channel or device to one or more grid cells
- low or high quality rendering
Links
- Source and README: codeberg.org/emicklei/midicycles
- Demo video by Sander: YouTube