Hope Bani Fasade

Seen and felt

The beat is not only a click

A swinging pendulum, a pulse ring that flashes on each beat, a grid of dots that lights up across the bar, and vibration that hits harder on the accent. The click itself is a light built-in system sound you can switch off entirely, and the visual beat carries on without it.

The trainer

Twelve exercises, three levels

• I
  Four on the floor, and the plain subdivisions under it.
• II
  Off-beat eighths, and the gallop.
• III
  Mixed bars of sixteenths and rests.

The rhythm is drawn as note-value blocks and rests, you get a count-in bar, and then you tap it. Afterwards you see how many hits landed on time, your average offset, and whether you are consistently rushing or dragging. Set the tolerance tight or forgiving; your best score is kept.

No account, no ads, no recordings, nothing leaving your phone.

Package com.tempoloom.pulsebeat

Before you turn the flash up. The visual beat is a flashing light. At the top of the range, 208 BPM in sixteenths, it flashes about 13.9 times a second — inside the band that can trigger seizures in people who are photosensitive, whether or not they know they are. Keep the brightness low, use the pendulum and the dot grid rather than the full-screen flash if you are unsure, and stop at once if anyone feels strange, dazed or unwell. Emergencies in Norway: 113 for an ambulance.

Working out

Why the weight slides up to slow it down

A wind-up metronome looks backwards: push the little weight up the rod and the beat gets slower. It is an inverted pendulum. Gravity pulls the fixed bob below the pivot, which is what restores the swing, and it pulls the sliding weight above the pivot, which fights that. Raise the slider and you cancel more of the restoring torque, so the period stretches. The whole scale lives in eight centimetres.

That last number is the point of the design. A plain hanging pendulum ticking 40 BPM needs a period of three seconds, which means a length of 2.24 m; at 208 BPM it needs 8.3 cm. Twenty-seven times the length, for a device meant to sit on a piano. The inverted rod covers the same 40 to 208 in about 81 mm of travel — and it pays for it at the slow end, where only 8 mm further up the rod the restoring torque reaches zero and the thing refuses to swing at all.

What is not here: no metronome. This page has no click, no beat, no tempo you can practise to and no trainer; it is a physics toy about a mechanical device, with an idealised rod of no mass and no friction, and it would make a poor timekeeper. Pulsebeat keeps time from the system clock and has no pendulum physics in it at all.