Tonic Melodic

Tonic Melodic is a fully procedurally generated meditative rhythm game powered by a maximalist approach to audio analysis. It seamlessly adapts well to most music genres, delivering tailored gameplay for any track you own.

With difficulty scaling across six dimensions, four distinct level layouts, and three versatile energy weapons—blast, slash, and bash with guns, sabers, and kinetically activated forearm force shields—we offer immediately engaging and challenging gameplay, optionally scaling to Olympic-like difficulties.

What music works well?

We've designed the music analysis to adapt to a wide range of genres equally well. For example, a classical track at any given combination of the seven difficulty scales we use in combination should be just as difficult as the same settings on any EDM or electronic track.

Note: Some tracks naturally don't work well, like music specifically designed to be aharmonic, arhythmic, or tracks that hold notes for prolonged periods to create atmosphere, like the soundtracks to horror films. Generally, any music that has a more complex design, like a changing tempo, a melody using more than 2-3 keys, or a more complicated arrangement, will work better than simpler musical tracks inherently because they tend to have more interesting compositions from which we extract recognizable patterns to match with gameplay.

This is done locally in seconds.

Visualize a world derived from music

Everything in this tiny world reacts to the music. It dances as much as it expects you to, and it's talented too.

Where most video games would pantomime animations of instruments being played, we have a full-scale 60-key piano that follows the melody's vibrato exactly, demonstrating not just the notation of the music, but this exact recording's musical interpretation of the track as it was performed. This is the second out of twelve increasingly detailed visualizer layouts. They start with the layouts that are most helpful and least intrusive to gameplay and only grow in complexity as you go down the list.

What music can I play, and where from?

We've designed our voice-searchable interface around a local library with up to tens of thousands of tracks you love and own (and a few free sample tracks for starters), rather than hundreds of 3-minute DLCs. We can work with almost any stereo audio in digital rights management (DRM)-free file formats.

Can I use my music streaming service?

Unfortunately, no. Although you can play any other media file you own without DRM (encryption). You can play media files, like podcasts, if you have the exact URL for it on the internet copied.

(I highly recommend buying albums instead of streaming them if you like this app. Purchasing a single song directly from artists is often equivalent to the income from 200-500 streams.)

For all commercial music streaming services: we wish we could, but alas no.