Use your QWERTY keyboard to play 4 octaves of 10 different Musical Modes

I wrote this Shockwave application in 1996 while working for Big Top Productions in Multimedia Gulch in San Francisco. It was a prototype intended to become part of a cool and funky typing tutor.

It lets you play musical scales using the touch typing method--QWERTY. Explore 10 musical moods! It's been on the web as part of Big Top Production's Circus Sideshow--FREE FUN on the web includes online games, toys, music and other silly things for kids and adults! Whoo-hui!

Directions:
1. After the shockwave application window finishes loading (321k) click in the window and then type on the keyboard to make sounds. Each row on the keyboard plays an octave.
2. You can hit the space bar to make a random melody, you can hold your mouse over the musical and the qwerty keyboards to play notes, too.
3. To change mode click the name of the mode at the bottom. Click the bee in the top right corner to turn on a drone sound that provides you with the tonal center, allowing you to hear each mode in relation to the tonic (the only way, really).

For example you can play the lowest octave by typing:
   zxcvm,./
play the next octave:
   asdfjkl;
the next octave:
   qweruiop
and the highest octave by typing
   12347890
(each finger plays same note when typing any key that would be typed with that finger, conforming to the proper touch typing method)

Rambling philosophy in raw form (why I did this):

First is the note — the mode, and by extension the mood, requires a center, a root. Without this root the mood is not clear, there is no tension and release. The tonal center around which there can be a pull, to allow tension via dissonance, resolution in consonance.

Solfege and Sargam - naming/knowing the elements of change

Octave = 8, not 12 [ White notes only ]

All traditional music is modal. Only in modern harmonic music do we progress from chord to chord, jumping from one root to another. Harmonic progression is another level of complexity. This combined with the abstraction of notes into names and time durations results in lack of familiarity with the basis, the root. We don't know our roots.

Our root is in the note. The modes are derived from the harmonics of the notes, a set abstracted and chosen from the myriad of pitches available in the higher harmonics produced in any resonant tone.

Ionian
Dorian
Phrygian
Lydian
Myxolydian
Aeolian
Locrian

With early exposure these modes and their relationship to each other could easily be as familiar to all of us as the primary colors and their relationship in the color wheel.

Sruti = note = revelation one receives by reading the ancient texts