Making some Noise - Teensy, TGA-Pro, and MIDI

Making Some Noise (and maybe even Music)!

In this blog post, I’ll share my experiences using the Teensy and TGA-Pro Guitar Audio Shield to process audio - both using an audio processing codec as well as MIDI. I’ve also included the Yamaha UX16 USB-to-MIDI controller to aid in patching my MIDI channels into the inputs of the Guitar Audio shield.

Teensy - Yet antother cheap USB uController board.

At the hear of this project is the Teensy 3.6 USB Microcontroller development board. This sub-$30 board is a feature-rich micro-controller using the Cortex M4, floating-point unit, digital and analog pins, and lots of communication protocols (USB, i2C, SPI, Serial, Ethernet). What makes this little USB-attached board so useful are the accompanying software elements:

Maestro Cue the Music!

Now it’s time to get conducting.

We’ve learned all about L-systems, midi magic, tools like MISEP that generates musical patterns. Now we can take it all together and generate some algorithmically inspired music!

To do this, I’mg going to reach for the isobar kit I mentioned in the first post. Rather than spend time writing the tedious algorithms to perform the mappings, this fine python library offers a rich collection of algorithmic generators and mappings - for chromatic, velocity, and rhythmic elements.

Listen to my MISPELling

expremigen - a lesson in MISPEL

Expremigen is an expressive midi generation library written in python by shimpe. It’s an exceptional tool to create musical compositions which can be rendered into MIDI and played out to an audio device.

In this post, we’re going to cover how to setup your OSX-based computer to play a midi file and then dive into using the python library, expremigen and it’s MIDI Specification Language (MISPEL) to generate some midi compositions.