teaching machines

Oscillating

June 12, 2019 by . Filed under electronics, music, public.

This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data.

The very first thing we must do this week is make noise. We’ll create this patch in Pure Data to generate a single frequency:

Follow these steps to produce your patch:

Challenges

After you get your patch working, answer the following questions on a piece of scratch paper.

  1. From time to time in these exercises, you’ll see questions whose answers are hidden until you click on them. The text is hidden to give you time to think and grow more wrinkles in your brain. After you answer, click on the text. What is the capital of Vermont?
    Montpelier
  2. What’s the lowest frequency you can hear? The highest?
  3. We call the lines that run from outlets to inlets edges. In Edit Mode, figure out how to delete edges. Delete the edge from osc~ and dac~. Add a new edge from osc~ to the right inlet of dac~. What effect does this have?
  4. In Edit Mode, box-select the three nodes by dragging from one corner of the patch to the diagonally opposite corner. Copy and paste (either via the Edit menu or the standard keyboard shortcuts) to produce an identical set of nodes. Investigate the dialtone heard on American landline phones. What is the standard? Produce the dialtone using your two wave generators.