Music Mouse, 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. Music Mouse walks the horizontal axis in steps of one right now. If we were to interpret the x-position as a MIDI number, we’d be walking the chromatic scale, which is […]
Music Mouse, 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. We’ll complete the Music Mouse in stages. In this stage, let’s get the joystick behaving like a mouse. We’ll start at a position and allow the joystick to move us around […]
Music Mouse, 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. Our final instrument is inspired by the work of composer Laurie Spiegel. In particular, we will recreate her instrument the Music Mouse. This software was released in the 1980s. In the […]
Arpeggiator, 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. The last step of our arpeggiator gives the musician the ability to control the tempo or timing of the notes. We’ll use our last potentiometer for this. Its reading will be […]
Arpeggiator, 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. Our first “draft” of the arpeggiator will only use two of the potentiometers. One will decide the root note, and the other will decide which of many possible sequences to walk […]
Arpeggiator, 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. Our previous instrument played multiple notes all at the same time. Today we’ll make an instrument that plays multiple notes in quick succession. Such sequences are called arpeggios. The arp- stem […]
Chorder, 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. 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 […]
Chords
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 are several ways to map an instrument’s “inputs” to the pitch that it “outputs”: Many to one. For example, the trumpet has just three valves. One presses on some combination […]
Chorder, 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. In the last exercise, we proved to ourselves that our hardware was working. In this next exercise, we want to extend our Arduino program so that when a tomato-capacitor is touched, […]
Chorder, 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. It’s time to assemble our instrument that plays chords. Let’s call it the chorder! What hardware shall we use for input? We’ve already used buttons, and we’ve already used potentiometers. We […]