teaching machines

Chorder, Part III

June 15, 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.

Currently our chorder writes messages like this to the serial port:

60
62
64
0

This looks like a I chord in the C major scale. The 0 means it should stop playing.

We now write a Pure Data patch that interprets these messages and generates the appropriate MIDI commands.

Note2

Let’s start by making an abstraction that plays or stops a particular MIDI note. Call it note2. It will behave a lot like note from our pentatouch. Create it in the following way:

Save your abstraction in note2.pd.

Main

With note2 in place, creating the main patch will be much simpler. Follow these steps:

Test your instrument. Touching the clips should produce I, ii, iii, VI, V, vi, and vii chords. Then find some fruit and vegetables to create your inputs.

Challenges

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

  1. Investigate some chord progressions in the major scale commonly found in popular music. Identify one whose sound pleases you.
  2. Experiment with your own chord progressions. What’s one you like? Compose a short, repeating progression and be prepared to play it for the group.