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 […]
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: […]