teaching machines

The Tiangle, 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 First Instrument It’s time to make our first instrument: the tiangle (sic). The tiangle will use a piece of hardware called a potentiometer, which is a knob that controls how […]

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 […]

Seeing Waveforms

This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. Author Christopher Paul Curtis writes in Elijah of Buxton, “Believe some to none of what you hear and only half of what you see.” The intended target of Curtis’ wisdom is […]

Oscillating

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: […]

Tiangle

Instrument #2 in my foray into Pure Data and Arduino is the tiangle (sic). We’ll use a potentiometer to slur the emitted pitch up and down. When musicians play notes with no break between, we call that a tie. Our instrument will tie together different angles or rotations of the potentiometer. Thus, tiangle. Technically, ties […]

Clickaphone

This summer I’ll be helping high schoolers make musical instruments in a three-week long summer camp. This is how we’re describing the camp: Randomly pick a technology. Chances are that technology is either used to automate or to entertain. But computers are not just appliances for making our lives easier. Because they are programmable, we […]