Groove Pizza is a circular rhythm app for creative music making and learning! It’s also a playful tool for creating grooves using math concepts like shapes, angles and patterns. Groove Pizza debuted at the Department of Education in April 2016 to the acclaim of The Washington Post, USA Today, Julian Lennon and many others. Over 1,500,000 Pizzas served in 216 countries to date!
Start working with one of the "specials" pizza presets and add/remove "toppings" to adjust the groove, or click on the "Shapes" tab and drag various shapes onto the big circle to play and explore math-inspired grooves. Share your creations on Facebook or Twitter, download as audio or midi files, or continue your groove over at Soundtrap.com or Noteflight.com.
Import your favorite GroovePizza session into interactive music notation at Flat.io by following the directions here: https://blog.flat.io/experiment-generating-a-sheet-music-from-your-groove-pizza/.
Accessible Groove Pizza
MusEDLab doctoral student Willie Payne with VIP undergraduate research assistant Alex Xu created an accessible Groove Pizza working in partnership with the NYU Ability Lab. To make the Groove Pizza more accessible for visually impaired users, the Lab designed and implemented different color pallets, audio cues, and keyboard controls for actions you can perform within the app. You can play with the accessible Groove Pizza prototype here.
Groove Pizzeria
![](https://i1.wp.com/www.ethanhein.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Groove-Pizzaria.png?w=1360")
MusEDLab masters graduate Tyler Bisson expanded the Groove Pizza concept to enable play with complex rhythms and polyrhythms, launching the Groove Pizzeria as part of his masters thesis. Explore and create with more complex rhythms here: https://tylerbisson.com/Groove-Pizzeria/. Learn more via Ethan Hein's blog post.
Groove Pizza History
The ideas behind Groove Pizza began in Ethan Hein's masters thesis work in 2013 at NYU, then extended into the physical and web realm in collaboration with Adam November and his senior thesis project. In late summer 2015, Adam November coded up our first web prototype and the MusEDLab began user testing with kids and music and math educators in NYC.
In January 2016, development began on the current Groove Pizza for MathScienceMusic.org as a mobile and web app for playful creation of musical grooves through shapes and math concepts.
Article on the development and design of the GroovePizza 2.0 by Ethan Hein and Sumanth Srinivasan
NYU masters thesis by Tyler Bisson extending the functionality to polyrythm and polymeter through a new Groove Pizzeria design.
Interested in circular music patterns? Learn more from Australian musician and educator John Varney.
MathScienceMusic Groove Pizza Credits:
Original Ideas: Ethan Hein, Adam November & Alex Ruthmann
Design: Diana Castro
Software Architect: Kevin Irlen
Creative Code Guru: Matthew Kaney
Backend Code Guru: Seth Hillinger
Play Testing: Marijke Jorritsma, Angela Lau, Harshini Karunaratne, Matt McLean
Odds & Ends: Asyrique Thevendran, Jamie Ehrenfeld, Jason Sigal