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 […]
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 […]