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 […]
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 our 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. By the end of the day, we’ll have an instrument that behaves like a piano, but with many fewer keys. In fact, this first incarnation of that instrument will have just […]
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 […]
The Tiangle, 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. We now have physical control over the sound waves that are being produced. The only hitch is that a lot of the frequencies in [0, 255] are outside the range that […]
The Tiangle, 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 have an Arduino setup that allows the player to crank a knob to produce numbers on the serial port. Now it’s time to add the music. In this exercise, we […]