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 TamTam 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 toch emulation). The port of TamTam 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 TamTam suite. The backend is using csound, but has not been improved in a lot of time.

Repositories

The MusicKeyboard repository is https://git.sugarlabs.org/simplepiano

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

Note the master branch in the TamTam 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 TamTamMini activity. I don't know if the code is working or not, but is a alternative to explore.

The activity TamTamJam use sequences of notes as loops to play. Can we save a loop in MusicKeyboard? Should be good for interoperability.

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 aas horizontal bars as the TamTamEdit activity do, maybe is more intuitive for kids.

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

More info

Page with information about TamTam development http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/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:

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Features/GTK3/Activity_Porting