Do you wish to create a chilling music score for your amateur horror film, but you have no musical experience? No problem!

The Musical Chord Progression Arpeggiator is a web experiment by Jake Albaugh that allows you to generate different musical scores based on a variety of different inputs. This tool allows users to create a series of arpeggios in a chord progression, resulting in a cycle of haunting, looping notes that rise and fall endlessly.

The results span an incredible range of tone and style. Choose a lower tempo, and you can practically see an astronaut silently running down the hallway of a spaceship, while at a higher speed, you can enjoy a new album of songs doing their best impersonation of Philip Glass.

Thousands of possible combinations

An arpeggio, or broken chord, is what happens when you play the three or more notes in a chord separately, one after the other. The Arpeggiator has an incredible level of fine control, with choices for the number of steps in the arpeggio, the order in which the notes are played, and whether the notes are straight or looped. The end result is thousands of possible combinations.

The web app also allows for selection of a mode (one of the seven primary scales) and a tonic step (a root note for a scale), which then determines the specific characteristics of the scale. Changing the tonic and mode changes qualities such as whether a note will be major or minor, or sharp or flat. Finally, the chord progression allows for each of the eight chords that are being arpeggiated to be individually selected within the generated scale.

The instrument has an astonishing amount of variety, and because of the well-thought out musical theory in the design, there’s almost no way to make a bad choice (within the limited confines of endless looping nightmare music, anyway). Your new career as an award-winning composer starts now.