eddiew / SoundSquare

SoundSquare

SoundSquare is a 16x16 pentatonic step sequencer. You have 8 instruments, 16 tones per instrument, and 16 steps at your fingertips!

To Build

1. Install a midi server. I used fluidsynth.
2. Install openFrameworks and the ofxMidi extension.
3. git clone this repo on your machine or download it as a .zip
4. Point hw3 to your openFrameworks installation in config.make
5. Run make

To Run

1. Run your midi server. For me, I run fluidsynth and point it to the correct sound card with: fluidsynth --server --audio-driver=alsa -o audio.alsa.device=hw:1,0 /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2
2. Run ./bin/hw3

Design

Here are the sketches and notes I made while designing SoundSquare. SoundSquare is heavily inspired by ToneMatrix

System design

I use midi for my sound output. This makes playing different instruments with different settings (like velocity, pitch, etc.) really easy. I get to focus on the design of my sequencer rather than the architecture.

Software-wise, I use a 2-d array of bitmaps to record which instruments are active at which pitches and steps. This allows me to use just 1 bit per combination of instrument, pitch, and step so it's quite efficient.

More screenshots

One instrument Multiple instruments Multiple instruments playing the same note at the same time. Check out how the dot gets divided into sectors!