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. First order of business: switch partners. Choose a partner that you haven’t worked with yet. Our previous instrument played multiple notes—a chord—all at the same time. Today we’ll make an instrument […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. First order of business: switch partners. Choose a partner that you haven’t worked with yet. An instrument is a device that maps input from the musician to the output that we […]
Playing Sound Files Once
This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. Certainly the most intellectually stimulating means of producing sound is to synthesize it. But sometimes we just want to play something that’s been prerecorded. In this exercise, we’ll create an abstraction […]
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 […]