Introducing Deltaphone
A collaborator and I have been talking about turtle geometry lately. Meanwhile, I’ve been taking the piano lessons I was never forced to take as a child. One thing led to another, and now these two separate activities of my life have had a child. That child is named Deltaphone.
Deltaphone is a blocks programming environment that is meant to highlight the relative jumps in musical patterns rather than the absolute note names, just as turtle geometry eschews coordinate systems in favor of turning and stepping forward. Here’s a quick demo in which I program Hot Cross Buns:
Deltaphone is the first programming language I’ve worked on that doesn’t have some form of textual source code. I generate a program representation directly from the Blockly model. It’s freeing to not have to think about parentheses.