Many years ago, I worked with the NYU Music Experience Design Lab to create a browser-based music theory tool called the aQWERTYon. It has two purposes: to turn the computer keyboard into a playable instrument, and to visualize chords and scales in an intuitive way. I am very proud of this tool, it was a lot of hard work, and I use it constantly when I’m teaching music theory. However, in the years since we stopped working on it, I have thought of some features I would want to add and refinements I would want to make. However, I am not much of a programmer and felt too overwhelmed by the idea of going into the code myself.
But then I thought, maybe this is my excuse to try vibe coding. So I told Claude to replicate the aQWERTYon. It made an HTML file that I uploaded to my web host, and there it was, a fully functioning knockoff of the app. Then I started adding missing features, and making some of the changes I had always wanted. Here’s the result, try it yourself.
This was disturbingly easy to do. As of this writing, I have spent a total of, I don’t know, half on hour on this? I’m using the free version of Claude and my own web hosting. Claude exports HTML files that I am just FPTing into my main web site directory. Continue reading “I joined the dark side and vibe coded a music theory app”
