Following on from the MIDI-based piano idea that I outlined earlier, today we will be going through writing a drum machione in Impromptu as was done in the KKB210 Computational Arts 1 week 3 tutorial.

You may have noticed that it is a bit of a pain to have to evaluate each note each time you want to play it. There is an easy way around this that we have used in the drum machine tutorial that can be applied to pretty much anything that needs to repeat in Impromptu.

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As part of the tutorial in week 3 of KKB210, Computational Arts 1, we were introduced to the Scheme programming language through the Impromptu environment.

We were looking at creating audio based on the Apple Sound Bank Synthesizer using the MIDI specifications.

As an introduction to this topic we started off simply by writing the code to play a single note on a piano.

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Introduction To Impromptu

April 6th, 2008

Impromptu is a programming environment that is intended to assist in the creation of computational arts of all varieties and is completely new to me.

It is designed for OS X, and this is probably part of the reason I have not come across it before since it was only November that I seriously started using a Mac.

Impromptu uses the Scheme programming language and is particularly suited to live programming, however in using it myself, it is obvious that the features built into it to assist live programming make regular programming much easier as well since changes can be made on the fly.

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