10.14.17 | Week 7. Blog Debrief

Note: class was canceled Monday, 9 Oct. due to Hurricane Nate.

My parts arrived, so I started looking into existing waveform / FM synthesis libraries for Arduino to make sure I could produce sounds to begin with. Ultimately, I decided on using Connor Nishijima's "Arduino-Synth Volume2 Library" because I was trying to make sure I could achieve a few specific benchmarks using minimal hardware (in this case literally just a speaker and a couple of wires):

- Produce different waveforms (square, triangle, saw, etc.)
- Produce multiple voices concurrently for polyphony or being able to use multiple "tracks" (evident in the lead and percussion).
- Make sure I could get sound at all.

It's not the loudest thing in the world, but I have a video demonstrating the test here: link

While the library for synthesis is unaltered, the composition / melody in this case is custom. The "lead" is composed of 3 separate sine synths (to test polyphony), and then a 4th channel for percussion. Percussion composition at low resolutions is a fascinating subject in general, and a lot of inspiration for getting it to work effectively in this project lends itself to similar achievements done via trackers in the culture of "demoscene", which generally just refers to a subculture that involved pushing hardware to its limits. In this case, all parts of the percussion use the same waveform (percussion is generally done via a noise wave), with different parts of a drum emulated using different pitches and tone lengths. Kicks are mid length and low, snares are long and mid-tone, while hi-hats are very short and high-pitched.

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