teaching machines

Triadic Chords in Deltaphone

When non-pianists approach a piano, they will strike random keys—but often just one key at a time. If they play more than one, the sound is likely to be unpleasant. But that’s only because they don’t know which keys to strike at the same time. Let’s work out in Deltaphone a system of notes that […]

SCSI 2019: Computational Music

Welcome to Computational Music, one of the courses at the 2019 Summer Computer Science Institute at Carleton College. This page contains all the course notes and exercises that you will need throughout the week. Day 1 On this day we introduce the notion of a sound wave, and we see how the frequency of these […]

Networking with Pure Data

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 input so far has come from an Arduino plugged into our computer. It’s time to free things up. Bring on the internet! In this exercise, we will see how to […]

Timbre and Harmonics

This post is part of a series of notes and exercises for a summer camp on making musical instruments with Arduino and Pure Data. Earlier we said that sounds are generated by oscillating sine or cosine waves. That was a lie. None of our musical instruments produce pure waves of a single frequency. Rather, they […]