Time Hero: Feel The Beat

For $20/month you can get a Codex account and make your own app, customized however you’d like.

I have always been drawn to the idea of studying Indian classical music because of the secure rhythmic sense I know I would attain from the practice. Obviously, playing this game is not the same as actually studying the tradition, but it gives you a little taste of it. What you do is learn to play tihai-s, which are rhythmic cadences based on playing the same phrase three times, in different metric orientations, landing ultimately on the “one.” These are really tricky and fun to learn. Like learning tongue-twisters. Every day, the app offers you a new selection of tihai-s to try: easy, medium, and hard. It is not clear whether there will be a an unlimited number of new ones issued daily, or if at some point they will start repeating. (This would be good to know, before investing in a year-long subscription!) The rhythmic cycle is represented with a polyhedron which you travel around—“follow-the-bouncing-ball” style. It is very nice, super clear. I believe in traditional music apprenticeship, you learn to count the rhythmic cycle on your fingers. This is a graphical representation of that. It works well. As you learn to tap the pattern on your phone, the app measures your rhythmic accuracy in milliseconds. It is surprising how far off you can be, when you think you are “on”—particularly on the off-beats. I will say that I have noticed my iPhone sometimes has trouble registering taps accurately when I use two fingers instead of one. It seems to need to register all the taps in the same place. I imagine that a major challenge for this app resides in the hardware. Phones aren’t designed for ultra-accurate rhythmic registry. Nonetheless, it seems to work well, provided you tap with one finger in the same spot.

This is a super cool app! Unfortunately, on my device, the taps seem out of sync. Every time I would calibrate in the app, I would get a different result. Mind you, I’m a classically trained pianist who studies music at university—been playing for twelve years. Who knows, it could be just a quirk on my device or maybe my screen protector is too think hahaha. Will definitely try again in the future but for now it doesn’t seem to work great :(