🎹 Neon Tiles — La Campanella

A neon-styled 4-lane rhythm game built around Franz Liszt's "La Campanella" (1851) — the famously brutal third étude from his Grandes études de Paganini, S. 141, in G♯ minor. This isn't a casual children's-song chart: 140 measures were transcribed straight from the score, including the high-register repeated D♯7 octaves, sweeping right-hand octave runs, trills, and the four-note climactic chord that closes out the cycle. To make it sound like a real piano performance, the game also runs an automatic left-hand backing track — 900+ scheduled events that play in sync underneath whatever you tap. Cyberpunk visuals with a cyan→magenta gradient palette, ambient drifting tiles on the start screen, and the Orbitron typeface frame the étude in proper arcade fashion.

🎮 How to Play

• Tap / Click — Tap tiles on mobile, or click them with the mouse on desktop.
• Keyboard — Use A S D F for the four lanes (left → right).
• Hold notes — For taller tiles, keep the key/finger pressed until the tile clears.
• Chord tiles — Some tiles play multiple notes at once (octaves and full chords) on a single tap.
• Burst tiles — Some tiles fire a rapid sequence of notes from a single tap, capturing the étude's 16th/32nd-note flourishes.
• Grace-note tiles — Some tiles play a tiny ornament ~30 ms before the main note.
• Tremolo holds — Some hold tiles alternate two notes continuously while you keep them pressed.
• Pause — Space or P
• Mute / Unmute — M
• Quick start / restart — Press D while any overlay is showing.

✨ Features

🎵 Real Score, Real Pitch

• 140 measures transcribed directly from the published "La Campanella" score, in the original key of G♯ minor.
• Every note plays at its actual pitch, covering a G♯2 → D♯7 range (well over four octaves) to accommodate both the right-hand bell figure and the left-hand bass passages.
• Dotted rhythms, trills, and sustained cadence holds are all preserved; only a handful of dotted-eighth+sixteenth ornaments are simplified for tappability.
• Tempo is ♩=120, with each game beat = one 8th note (250 ms).

🎶 Four Tile Types Built for the Étude

La Campanella's writing is too dense for a single tile-per-note model, so this chart introduces four specialized tile types that pack the score's actual content into something playable:

• Chord tiles (extras + gap=0) — One tap fires up to 4 notes simultaneously. Used for the étude's signature D♯6+D♯7 octave repetitions in the opening measures, and for the four-note climactic chord (G♯5+B5+D♯6+G♯6) that closes the cycle.
• Burst tiles (extras + gap=50) — One tap fires a quick sequence of notes spaced 50 ms apart, perfect for the étude's rapid right-hand runs and arpeggiated flourishes — gives you the sound of the 16th-note passage without demanding inhuman individual taps.
• Grace-note tiles — A short ~30 ms ornament fires before the main note, with both at full volume — captures Liszt's written grace notes faithfully.
• Tremolo hold tiles — Hold the tile down and the game alternates two notes every ~62.5 ms for the duration of the hold (e.g., B6 ⇄ C♯7). Used for the étude's high-register tremolo passages — release at any point and the alternation stops cleanly.

🎹 Automatic Left-Hand Backing Track

• A complete second voice plays itself in the background — 900+ note events spanning the whole 140-measure piece, scheduled in advance via the Web Audio clock so it stays sample-accurate.
• The backing track rescales with the game's tempo: every speed-up cycle re-schedules the remaining LH events at the new BPM, and pause/resume cancels and reschedules to keep both hands locked.
• Includes its own tremolo events (alternating bass figures) for moments where the left hand carries the rhythmic motion.
• The result: when you tap the right-hand tiles correctly, you're hearing a real two-handed piano performance, not just a melody line.

🚀 Progressive Difficulty

• BPM increases by +12.5% per cycle (120 → 135 → 150 → 165...). At an étude that's already considered one of the hardest in the standard repertoire, the first speedup is genuinely punishing.
• Each cycle is also transposed up by a whole step (2 semitones), sending the already-stratospheric high notes (D♯7) into territory that would shatter glass on a real piano.

💢 Visible Miss Feedback

• Tap on empty space, hit the wrong tile, release a hold too early, or let any tile fall off-screen — all trigger a red flash at the relevant tile (and a circle pulse at the tap point), held for 450 ms.
• Plays a dissonant low buzz with downward portamento so misses are clearly audible.
• The game ends after the miss display, giving you a clear "what just happened" beat instead of a silent cut to game over.

🎨 Polished Neon Visuals

• Hand-tuned per-lane colors along a cyan → blue → purple → magenta