I can, yes.
Okay, yeah, so I'm Zachary Kanfer,
let's go to the
questions. The first question, "Why
do we go top to bottom for time
progression,
and left to right for low to high?"
Interesting, I think…, so the initial
thing I was copying, that initial app
work this way, and
yeah, I mean, certainly traditional music,
you know, on a staff
does go left to right like this.
I mean, going top to bottom does make
it easier to add more beats without
having to wrap, but certainly that could
be managed.
Yeah, I had not really thought about
it, but it is definitely something worth
looking into.
Yeah.
Ah, good point, thank you. Let me go ahead
and do that.
The entire screen…
Okay, so the screen share should be
starting,
there we go. Cool, all right.
Two, "Will you play us another song?" Not
now, I can make some recordings of
it, or certainly you can try it.
I couldn't quite get the
microphone and the webcam and everything
to work with the sound playing now. So,
I can record some. Also, please…
I have put a link at the… here in the
Etherpad, zck.org/emacsconf2020 [updated],
where you can go and get the source,
and you can try it yourself. There's
no dependencies needed, so it's just all
in Emacs. So, please, you know, try it
yourself.
"Any chance for an Emacs tracker or mod
player?"
I don't really know what a mod player
or tracker
are, but I mean, I'm sure
that would be cool, maybe there's one
on now, but I don't know.
My musical background. So, I've played
various instruments since about the
third grade.
Started recorder, play cello, I play
guitar now.
But yeah, so just kind of random
instruments, and
I guess kind of some of those
things
influence how I think about music.
"Are there any open source musical
management sample libraries that could
be used?"
Good question, I'm sure there are, I
don't know any of that integrate really
well with Emacs.
One of the cool things that I liked
about this is that there are no
dependencies,
you know, you don't need any external
program to
generate the music. I mean, it does
shell out to
to play, but that
should be able to be done on any
operating system, as always, you have
something that can play WAVE files,
but yeah, it is interesting to kind of
try the different sounds and different
tones that you could get with
different instruments.
Have I written any actual songs?
Nothing super
well put together, I kind of just
been playing around with this.
It's kind of… making this was one of
those things where once I made it, I
was like, okay,
now I can play with it, and I did a
little bit, and was like, I don't know if
I feel like it right now.
You know, which I've found that to
be the case with some things that I've
implemented
in Emacs where it's… I make it, and then
it's the kind of some of the desire to
use it all the time
goes away, but I'm sure I'll circle back
around
at some point especially kind of maybe
once I add in different tones or
something.
I guess a similar question for
pre-recorded sounds. Yeah, I mean,
if it's… part of what I did, what I wrote
was a
WAVE generation library, so, if you kind
of have the data,
you could use those and chop them
up and take certain lengths of them
and make a WAVE file, so it's not plug and
play right now, but you could certainly
add those notes to do it.
"Any MIDI mapping possibilities?"
I haven't looked into it, but I'm sure
you definitely could output to MIDI
which is another benefit of having
that multiple layers with the top layer
is just,
you know, if the root note is this,
we're just two semitones up or seven
semitones up or whatever it is.
It should be relatively simple to
kind of switch out that layer underneath
from WAVE to MIDI or other things.
"What were some of the challenges with
writing a special mode for Emacs?"
Interested in getting into this, not
sure where to start.
There… yeah, it so…
this isn't the first mode I've written,
so that's right…,
certainly that helps. I actually…
I have a video that we recorded it
as part of EmacsNYC on making a major
mode.
That's basically starts from
nothing, and kind of builds up to
an implementation of tic-tac-toe,
but so it kind of goes into printing
things out and buttons and making the
mode.
I mean, one of the best parts about Emacs
is, because it's so
configurable and so introspectible,
you can start pretty simply,
and just kind of ask Emacs about things,
and then make one little
change. It's really… it's not that bad,
so, I'll try to throw a link up on that
page I put up, or
please email me for whoever asked this
question to get a link to that video,
or just look at the source
code of this or any other major mode.
Emacs makes it
pretty easy to extend
major modes. And I think that's
the last question
in the Etherpad, so, thanks so much
everybody for coming.
(Amin: Thank you so much
to Zachary for your awesome talk,
and for doing live questions.
Thank you.) Thank you. (Amin: Cheers.)