About
ToneWright is a small workshop that builds instruments in software - nine of them so far - and writes about how the real ones work.
What we actually know
It matters more than usual for a site like this, because the internet is full of instrument pages written by people who have never touched the instrument. So, plainly:
- Building instruments in software. The app's audio runs on an engine we wrote in C++, with the sound following your finger in a handful of milliseconds. Getting there meant measuring things most listeners never think about: how a sampled note is looped without going organ-like, why a bank sounds quieter when struck harder, why switching to a Bluetooth speaker mid-song can shift the pitch by a semitone and a half. Those measurements are ours, and where we write about them we say what we measured and how.
- Finding and transcribing music. The hundred melodies in the app are all public domain, and not one was written down from memory. Each came from a named source - a specific tune setting on The Session, a specific score in the Mutopia Project, a specific engraving - and was checked against it by a tool rather than by ear. The provenance travels with the song wherever it appears.
- Reading the research before designing. When we built a room for conducting an orchestra, the beat patterns were checked against conducting treatises and motion-capture studies rather than against a memory of a film. When something we make is a design choice rather than a fact, we say so.
What we don't know
Nobody here is a concert performer or a music teacher. When these pages explain how an instrument is played, or where it came from, or what a scale does, that is not an expert speaking from a career - it is carefully-sourced writing, and the sources are linked so you can go past us to them.
We also do not review instruments to buy. Recommending a handpan or a kalimba to spend money on would mean having played dozens of them, and we have not, so there are no buying guides here and no affiliate links anywhere on the site.
How these pages are written
- Nothing from memory. If a page states a fact about an instrument's history or tuning, it is either cited or derived from something you can check on the page itself.
- The instrument comes first. Every instrument page opens with the instrument, not with an introduction about the instrument. If reading was better than playing, we would not have built any of this.
- No dark patterns. There is no newsletter wall, no cookie banner because there are no cookies, no advertising, and no tracking. See Privacy.
- Corrections are welcome. If something here is wrong, write to us and it gets fixed with the date changed, not quietly edited.
The app
Everything on this site is a piece of the app: the same layouts, the same recordings, the same engine rendering them. It works offline, on phones and tablets, in 21 languages. More about it here.
Contact
contact@tonewright.app - for corrections, questions, and problems with the app.