Introduction:

What is "Plate of Macaroni"? No it is not a gourmet student meal, it is a program for scoring Csound songs. I decided to make this program because making music in Csound is an abhorrent task. To my knowledge this is the only program that scores Csound music in an intuitive way.

Download Here!

Background Information:

One dark and stormy night I was making a Csound composition when a bolt of Gen24 lightning hit me. The bolt of lightning gave me a vision of a program which was easy to use. Plate of Macaroni uses a graphical keyboard as input and makes sheet music to represent the notes played on the keyboard.

Programs Used:

This Program was made using:

• Visual Basic 6.0
• 3D Studio Max 5 for the Keyboards
• Paint for the sheet music

   

Manual:

• ** IMPORTANT ** - This program somewhat works on a GIGO scheme. The program expects that an input file will be in the order of:
  o Instrument number (Consecutively not random i.e. not i1 i2 i1)
  o Start time (actual time)
  o Duration
  o Amplitude
  o Frequency
  o Attack
  o Release
  o Other
  Conceivably you could use attack and release for different P-values. At any rate these can be left blank or be entered as 0's. The program will parse out comments when reading and will make its own when saving.

• Making Music - This is done by simply clicking on the notes of the keyboard.
• Selecting Notes - You can select notes by clicking and dragging. There will be a blue highlighted box at the bottom of the music to indicate which notes are selected.
• Notes Mode - There are two modes Insert and Add. Add will add to the end, insert will add notes to the insert point.
• Inserting Notes - This can be done by Clicking on Insert note, in the notes box, and clicking on the note in the composition which you wish to insert before.
• Deleting Notes - This is achieved by selecting the note(s) you wish to delete and then either pressing the delete key or pressing the remove note button.
• Different Notes - There are six different presets in the notes box. These presets are for the different note durations in music. Selecting one of these by clicking on it will highlight the selected note duration. A note of this type will be inserted or added afterwards when the keyboard is clicked upon.
• Envelope settings - These are presets for each note and whatever is in these boxes will become the values of "Attack, Release, and Misc." for each subsequently created note.
• Tracks - You can add or delete tracks with the options in this box
• Adding Tracks - This is simply done by clicking the add track button in the tracks box.
• Deleting Tracks - This is done by selecting the track you wish to delete and then clicking the delete track button in the tracks box.
• Switching Tracks - Each track has a tab jus above the music and this tab can be clicked to change to a different track.
• Amplitude - This is a preset for notes being added or inserted. It can be affected by using the slider or by entering a value into the text box right above the slider
• Rests - Clicking on one of the six buttons in the rests box will insert or add a rest of that type (and duration) into the composition
• Selected Note: This area brings up the various attributes of a selected note.
• Open - opens a score file. There are two ways: click the open button or clock File->open. This will bring up a file dialog.
• Saving - Saves your composition and works in the same way as the Open feature.
• New - Clicking this makes a new composition.
• Misc. - here you can enter extra P-values and comments (;).
• Different Keyboards - There are included four different keyboards. Renaming one of these .BMP files to Keyboard.BMP will change the look of the keyboard to a different material. Other keyboard looks can be made by e-mailing me. Use the Help->About menu selection to find out my address.

Examples:

Here is a screen shot

Conclusion:

This tool is intuitive and will accelerate Csound composition process greatly and can be used by children. The loading of a score file has been tested on several differently formatted versions and they have all loaded correctly, there may be type that do not though.

Future developments will include more note options, better musical notation representation, and note playback for each struck key on the keyboard.

If there is a comctl32 error upon execution of Macaroni, I have included an install for that in the compressed program archive. Just install comctl32.exe

Download Macaroni.zip

By: Devon St. Denis - Richard
[email protected]

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