leesean.netI got the audio visualization to work. The waves represent the audio waveforms of the percussion alphabet. The letters fade out gradually after you type them to in order to help pace the user and to represent the “life cycle” of each note through time. Here is a screenshot:
Source code after the jump:
I have completed phase 1 of my ICM final project, Text2Drum, which involves me creating a new “percussion alphabet”, perhaps another way to describe it is “a musical Morse code.” I have assigned a unique percussion sample to each letter of the alphabet. I have assigned ‘A’ through ‘G’ pitched percussion hits that correspond to the white keys on a piano, but voiced at different octaves. All of the other letters are un-pitched percussion sounds. I have not assigned sounds to punctuation marks or numbers (yet). I’m not sure if I want to or if this is necessary for my new language.
I have written a Processing sketch, with the help of the Minim library, that that plays back the “percussion letters” when the user types on the keyboard. There is a bit of latency and audio “crackle” that still needs to be worked out, but for the most part, the musical typewriter works. The next step is to build a related program that can read a text file as a musical score, translate the letters into percussion alphabet, play back the results, and save the audio playback as a file.
For more info, refer to my previous post about Text2Drum, or see my source code for the musical typewriter after the jump.