The other day I found a rhythm game online that I like quite a bit.

The creator made it for a contest with a 48 hour time limit.

http://fizzd.itch.io/a-dance-of-fire-and-ice

It’s a different sort of concept. Two circles, one red and one blue, orbit around each other. You press one button on the keyboard to make a circle stop on the next square. If you miss the square by being late, you restart. You hear music that tells you what the tempo and the patterns of squares correspond to the music.

The first level consists of a straight line of blocks. What ends up happening is that have an orbit, 180 degrees (π radians) is a single beat.

So for this level, you press the button for quarter note values on each beat.

Later on, there are other patterns where the boxes are closer to each other. In those cases, you have different rhythmic values.

Basically, there are eight boxes surrounding one box. A complete rotation is two beats. Half a rotation is one beat.

Within the half rotation there are four options, so one beat split into four becomes sixteenth notes.

There are also points in the game where you rotate 270 degrees, with a dotted quarter note value.

The game switches between downbeats and upbeats starting pretty early on.

The tempo also changes and there are elements which change the orientation of the ‘maze’ as well as slowing down and speeding up the tempo. The final level of each world is significantly harder than the earlier levels.

So far, I have gotten to the final stage of world 3.

You can check out a video of me playing through the first world. I make a few mistakes. Should give you a sense of how the game works.

Internal Rhythm vs Saxophone Rhythm

You have a sense of rhythm inside yourself which can be more or less directly applied to different things.

Talking/singing is fairly direct. As is drumming or playing a one button game like this.

With the saxophone, you often need to press many keys perfectly in time. And the keys are not built equally. Sometimes you’re pressing and lifting fingers simultaneously. The keys also have different amounts of resistance.

So even if you have perfect internal rhythm, it will take some training to transfer that rhythm to the saxophone. That involves the development of technique and learning your instrument very well.

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