Machine Setup for Computational Music
This coming summer I’m leading a summer camp on digital music and sound generation. There are many steps to get the computers set up, and I record them here to share with helpful system administrators and my future self. Software to Install The following is a list of the base software that needs to be […]
Frequency Envelope
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. In this exercise, we will look at shaping a sound wave. Instead of blasting out a fixed frequency cosine wave, we will allow the user to draw with the mouse a […]
Pentatouch, Part II
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. With the pentatouch hardware in place, we now turn our attention to generating its music in Pure Data. We break down the patch into three steps: pairing the data, branching based […]
Pentatouch, Part I
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 monodrone allows us to pound on a single key of a piano, while this next instrument allows us to pound on five. We’ll call it the pentatouch, as it will […]
Abstractions
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. Pure Data patches can get very messy very quickly. Imagine what it would look like if our monodrone had two buttons. Or three. Or five! Lines would canvas the screen like […]
The Monodrone, Part III
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. There’s something wrong with our monodrone. It plays a lot of notes at the same time! Why does this happen? To find out, hit the close 1 message back in Pure […]
The Monodrone, Part II
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. Now we’ll use Pure Data to generate some MIDI notes when the button is pressed. Start by assembling this patch that reads from the serial port: Test that you can get […]
The Monodrone, Part I
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. First order of business: switch partners. Choose a partner that you haven’t worked with yet. Today we’ll build an instrument that behaves like a piano but with fewer keys. In fact, […]
Hot vs. Cold Inlets
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. Summer Camp Let’s start with a patch that adds two numbers and shows their sum. Using three Numbers and one Object, create this program: Connect up the outlets and inlets as […]
The Midiometer
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. Waves vs. MIDI When we generate sound by altering the frequencies of waves, we are operating at a pretty low level. Most musicians don’t think about physical laws like we have […]