A living color field that translates accumulated harmonic content into hue, saturation, value, and spatial depth.
In developmentHarmonic Prism
A standalone instrument that listens to your playing over a longer session and renders an evolving color field. Where the Vector Keyboard captures the geometry of the moment, the Prism captures the gravitational drift of a whole performance.
Why it's separate
The Vector Keyboard reads what you're playing right now. The Harmonic Prism reads what you've been playing — and renders it as a synesthetic painting that builds, shifts, and saturates as you commit further into a mode. Two instruments, two timescales.
Hue · Saturation · Value
A three-dimensional color space mapped from accumulated harmonic content. Hue comes from the detected key + modal lean (Lydian gold → Locrian violet). Saturation comes from how committed the playing is — pentatonic ambiguity reads as washed-out, exploited characteristic intervals saturate the color. Value comes from chord density and harmonic richness — sparse readings darken, fully voiced extensions brighten.
Register → Depth
The pitch register of what you play becomes spatial depth on screen, like the recession of a painting. Bass = background — felt, not seen, defining the air and weight of the space. Mids = midground — where the harmonic character lives, where vocals would sit. Highs = foreground — fine detail, ornamentation, edge definition. The color field's centerpoint shifts vertically and outward to match.
Long-term accumulation
Where the Vector Keyboard has a ~5-second memory, the Prism remembers everything you've played in a session. Each chord progression, each modal shift, each emotional emphasis leaves a trace that builds the color field over minutes. The final canvas becomes a portrait of the session — exportable, savable, comparable across performances.
IC-class star geometry
Each interval class has its own star-polygon geometry on the 12-tone circle — fifth-motion traces a dodecagon, major thirds form a triangle, minor thirds a square, semitones a 12-point star, tritones converge to a singularity. The Prism layers these forms behind the color field as a translucent geometric fingerprint of what intervals are dominating the playing.