A free browser music studio lets you play chords by touching neighboring shapes
Christian Suer’s project combines a visual harmony tool with recording and export, but its free personal-use license is narrower than an open-source music workstation’s.
Neighboring shapes on a music grid can be a more inviting place to find a chord than a row of piano keys that looks as though it expects you to have done your homework.
Tonnetz Pro turns that spatial idea into a browser studio. Its maker, Christian Suer, describes a synthesizer, recording environment and music-theory tool built around Euler’s Tonnetz. Notes and chords sit in a two-dimensional arrangement that lets a player explore relationships by position and shape.
The project README says the grid translates musical intervals into physical space. Horizontal edges represent fifths; diagonal relationships supply thirds. The attraction is being able to recognize how a chord sits among its neighbors while hearing what the movement does. The relationship between notes becomes something you can locate with a finger while hearing how each change affects the chord you were playing.
The geometry is optional. The author says the app is “fully usable as a traditional DAW” and offers an on-screen keyboard or a MIDI controller as another starting point. People who already understand a keyboard don’t have to trade it in for a triangle before recording anything.
Around the grid sit a multitrack arranger, mixer and eight cyclical looper tracks. The README describes per-track volume, panning, echo and reverb sends, with recorded tracks retaining the active instrument’s parameter settings. A chord can become a recorded part, then another layer, instead of disappearing as soon as your finger leaves the screen.
Live chords are also broken into individual MIDI events in the piano roll. That matters when one note of an otherwise useful take needs changing. A recorded chord can retain the notes that work while one awkward note moves elsewhere, without requiring the whole performance to be recorded again.
The web version is described as offline capable with persistent local storage. Those are the maker’s stated capabilities, not a guarantee that browser data will survive a reset, a different profile or an overenthusiastic cleanup. A local project still benefits from an export you control.
The README lists master audio export formats including WAV, MP3, MP4 and WebM. It also describes MIDI import and export and .dawproject support. Those are useful routes out of the browser, but importing a project from another workstation is described differently from restoring the application’s own native project. A shared file extension therefore needs a trial with the particular project and workstation you want to move between before it becomes a reliable exchange route.
The license in the same repository is the boundary that a free download button can hide. Source you can inspect isn’t automatically source you may redistribute. “Personal, non-commercial use” is the permission the author actually grants.
A browser studio could make musical experiments easier to start, especially when a shape suggests a chord you wouldn’t have reached for on a keyboard. Whether its exports and input latency fit an existing recording setup remains something to establish with that setup.
The triangles don’t require homework.