Activities/Music Keyboard



= Description =

This activity born as a proof of concept for a piano keyboard widget, with the idea of add this widget to the existing Tam Tam suite. This widget should be usable with touch devices, as the XO-4, and support multiple touches, then we need use Gtk3 (Gtk2 only support a simple touch emulation). The port of Tam Tam suite to Gtk3 already started, but is complex and need more work.

The piano widget trigger events for every key pressed/released, and is designed to be easily included in other activities.

The part of the code needed to play the notes, is copied from Tam Tam suite. The backend is using csound, but has not been improved in a lot of time.

= Repositories =

The Music Keyboard repository is https://git.sugarlabs.org/simplepiano or https://github.com/godiard/music-keyboard-activity

The Tam Tam repository is https://git.sugarlabs.org/tamtam

Note the master branch in the Tam Tam repository is where the port to Gtk3 started, but is not finished. If you want generate a usable activity, should use the branch sugar-0.94

= Download =

Activity page in our activities portal

= Google Summer of Code proposals =

Two tasks are proposed for the GSoC 2013:

Add recording to Music Keyboard activity
There are code, actually commented, to record sounds in Tam Tam Mini activity. I don't know if the code is working or not, but is a alternative to explore.

The activity Tam Tam Jam use sequences of notes as loops to play. Can we save a loop in Music Keyboard? Should be good for inter-operability.

Other options to explore, is check if we can save the key press/release events, or convert to a more useful format as midi.

Display notes in a score in Music Keyboard activity
Daniel Francis proposed: "I have been working some time ago on a staff widget to show the notes [1]. Has pending to draw notes with sharps and flats (black keys in the piano)."

Another option is show the notes as horizontal bars as the Tam Tam Edit activity do, maybe is more intuitive for kids.

[1] http://git.sugarlabs.org/stafflib/test

= More info =

Page with information about Tam Tam development Activities/Tam Tam

If you never developed a Sugar Activity, you must read:

http://www.flossmanuals.net/make-your-own-sugar-activities/

Note, most of the book examples use Gtk2, but we moved to Gtk3.

General information about port from Gtk2 to Gtk3 is here:

Features/GTK3/Porting

If you want help us fixing some bugs on activities, and learn a little about how activities work, you can see at this list of pending tickets:

http://dev.laptop.org/~gonzalo/bugs_index.html