newritual

Ria

Relative Interval Apparatus

Ria is a melodic instrument organized around movement rather than position. Instead of selecting fixed pitches, the player performs interval gestures—up three, down one, same—and the instrument traces a path through whatever scale and harmonic context is active. Melody emerges from the accumulation of these relative decisions rather than from knowing where each note lives.

The interface centers on a three-dimensional spiral: one revolution per octave, with notes appearing as they are played. A generative companion called Flutter can join in—a Markov-chain voice trained on recorded performances that listens, waits, and improvises alongside the player when invited.

Ria supports microtonal tuning systems, multiple keyboard layouts, and full MIDI input and output, including MPE for instruments that speak in continuous pitch.

Ria is available in the browser and as a standalone desktop app. The browser version is ideal for immediate exploration; the standalone version is recommended for dedicated performance setups and native device integration.

Euclidean

Euclidean is a rhythm instrument built on a simple mathematical principle: distribute a given number of beats as evenly as possible across a given number of steps. The resulting patterns—known as Euclidean rhythms—turn out to match rhythmic structures found across West African, Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, and Flamenco traditions.

Up to five rhythmic rings orbit a shared center, each with its own voice, step count, and rotation. A sweeping arm triggers sounds as it crosses each ring’s active steps. The visualization is spatial and immediate—you hear the geometry.

Beneath the surface, two systems add life to what could otherwise be mechanical repetition. Drift applies micro-timing offsets that give patterns a human groove. Auto Dub—inspired by Lee “Scratch” Perry’s mixing-desk improvisations—spontaneously varies volume, effects, and even the patterns themselves during playback, then quietly reverts.

Euclidean Standalone is now the most advanced version of the instrument: a native desktop drum machine with sample-frame scheduling, native audio, MIDI clock, sample loading, kits, per-ring envelopes, sound sculpting, mute groups, Drift, Auto Dub, and memory slots.

Dodecahedron

Dodecahedron maps harmony onto geometry. Each of the twelve pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron carries a diatonic scale—a root and a mode—and the twenty vertices where three faces meet reveal how those scales relate. Vertices glow brighter where adjacent scales share more common tones, making harmonic consonance visible and navigable.

The player moves from face to face, hearing chords change as the geometry turns. An auto-traverse mode can guide this navigation using harmonic gravity—weighting choices by common tones, circle-of-fifths distance, and functional resolution—so the dodecahedron finds its own path through chord space.

The instrument extends an earlier physical practice of hand-built paper dodecahedra used as scores for group improvisation. In this digital form, the geometry becomes audible, rotatable, and responsive—a space to think inside rather than a map to follow.

Dodecahedron is available in the browser and as a standalone desktop app. The standalone version preserves the harmonic geometry workflow while adding native desktop routing and installer-based performance use.

Together

These instruments are designed to speak to one another. Euclidean can generate pulse and rhythmic structure, Dodecahedron can establish and traverse harmonic space, and Ria can respond melodically inside that shared context. The web apps remain open and immediate, while the standalone versions provide the stronger foundation for performance-oriented setups.

Three-App Setup Guide →