WEBVTT

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Hi.

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I'm Zachary Kanfer, and this is waving

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at repetitive repetitive repetitive

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music. Over quarantine, I've been bored,

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and I found this Android app that has a

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bunch of mini-games,

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one of which lets you compose music.

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And it works, but I

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want a little bit more functionality

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than it offers, it's not very flexible.

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So, I thought what if I made this,

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and what programs could I make this

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in that are really flexible, are really

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customizable.

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Emacs. So, I looked into it, and

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Emacs can play sounds, right? If you hit

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control g a couple of times, you'll hear

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like an error tone,

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and it turns out that, that is actually

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playing a WAVE file,

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but what's a WAVE file?

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Well, it turns out that WAVE is a musical

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file format,

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or really an annoying file format.

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So, data in it can be an unsigned integer

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or a signed integer, it's not consistent,

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and it's little-endian by default which

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is not the way I like to think about it.

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Now, you can

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set a WAVE file to be big-endian,

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but if you do that,

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Emacs can't play it.

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So, little-endian it is.

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There's also duplicate data fields.

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Here are some fields that are fine, but

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then there's a fourth field that's

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calculated based on multiplying two of

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the other ones together,

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and then there's another data field

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that's… you multiply those three ones

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together. So, it's just repetitive and

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unnecessary, but you have to do it, or

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it's not a valid WAVE file.

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Also, the last part of the file is

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described as data

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or as one website I found said,

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the actual sound data. Now,

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I don't know about you but when I see

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that, I think,

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what is data? It turns out

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that sound is just a wave, and

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the data is just a bunch of measurements

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of the height of that wave forming each

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sample.

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So, this wave starts at 8 goes 9, 11, 13,

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14, 15, and then back down. If you just

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take those measurements, those numbers,

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put them in a file,

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that's all your data is.

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All right. Let's go to a demo of my

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program.

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So, this is what zmusic looks like. The

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blue highlighted row is a single beat,

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there's 16 of them in this zmusic file,

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and each dash in the row

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is a single note increasing…, starting

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really low all the way on the left and

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going up

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as we go to the right. So, if we started

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playing,

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we won't hear anything, but we'll see the

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highlighted beat is the currently

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playing one,

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and we see that it loops.

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So, we can stop it,

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and now we can click to add some notes.

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[Music]

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Even more than one note at the same time

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works.

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[Music]

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And we can even add notes

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while it's playing.

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[Music]

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Okay, here are some other features that I

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didn't have time to demo.

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So, you can save the music to a file, and

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this is interesting because normally

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if there's no note in a beat, we just

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don't play that beat,

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but if you're writing to a file you have

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to put something in,

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so when it's playing it knows to not

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make a sound there.

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We can also use different scales.

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We're using the minor pentatonic

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in the demo, but you can use the major

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scale the minor scale

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or anything else.

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And there's also keyboard support,

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but it sounds really bad,

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and I'll explain why later.

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Here are some things I learned while

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writing zmusic.

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Emacs has buttons which are great as

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long

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as you don't put two of them right next

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to each other. So, if you do that,

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mousing over one of them highlights both

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of them.

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Now, that's because a button is really

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just a series of characters with a text

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property to highlight them.

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So, the fix is, you put another character

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between the two buttons,

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then mousing over one of them only

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highlights the one you want,

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but even this doesn't work really great

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for zmusic,

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because zmusic has a lot of very

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small buttons in a row.

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So, it's really easy to accidentally put

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your cursor over the space

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and click on that instead of the button.

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So, I looked into unicode, and I found

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this character called

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a zero-width space. So, we should be able

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to put that between buttons and not be

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able to accidentally click on it.

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Unfortunately, a zero-width space isn't

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actually zero width.

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If we put a hundred of them between two

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other characters, you can see there's

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space there,

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and I think what's happening is, the

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space is zero width

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but then Emacs `put` uses one pixel between

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each pair of characters

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for the cursor, so it's almost zero width.

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Some ways to play sound that don't quite

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work! `play-sound` plays music,

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but it blocks, you can't do things like,

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set other notes or even pause the music.

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And if you throw it into async.el, it's

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silent, and I don't know why.

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So, the solution I went with is taking

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that WAVE file,

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ran into the file system, and then

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shelling out to a native executable to

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play the sound.

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And that works fine as long as you only

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do it once,

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because if you do it a couple of times at

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the same time like if you have a chord,

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and you want to play three notes

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simultaneously,

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you get this weird interference, and

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that's actually why the keyboard from

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before didn't work.

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Also, side effects have this unexpected

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impact,

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when you saw the demo it was running

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pretty smoothly,

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but if I just add one message statement

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every beat for

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debugging purposes, I was getting lag and

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jitter.

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Here's the one thing I learned about

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music theory, music theory

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is not easy to program.

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I was looking around to see what

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concepts we can use to code the scales,

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to code the notes,

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the first thing that I saw is

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scale degrees,

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and this when I looked into it, you don't

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want to program in scale degrees.

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So, you see we have the first, second,

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third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh but

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then it wraps around. That octave up

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is also a first, and that's because both

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of those notes are C,

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so that didn't work, and also you

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couldn't really easily

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specify a flat or sharp. You could say

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a sharp third or

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you know, a flat seventh or whatever, but

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then you kind of have these two pieces

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of data that indicate the note, and I

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didn't love that.

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So, I looked again, and I

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found intervals,

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and then I thought about it, and you

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don't really want to program in

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intervals either.

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It fixes some of the problems with scale

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degrees, you see,

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all the way on the right you have an

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octave, so you wrap to 8, and you

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go 9, 10 and that works. But you solve the

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same problem, you see you have a major

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third but below we also have a minor

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third, so you saw that problem of having

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two pieces of information.

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So, I thought about it. Music is really

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frequencies. Like an A is 440 hertz.

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So, at a low level that's what we're

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going to do, we're just going to use

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frequencies.

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And then at the one level above that,

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that's a little bit easier for humans to

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think about,

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we're going to use semitones up from the

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root, which is kind of like scale degrees,

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but instead of just counting each note

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as one more, we're going to say how many

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semitones up it is.

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So, if there's a sharp between two notes,

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that's going to be two steps up instead

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of just one.

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And then we translate those two

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frequencies, so your A is 440 hertz,

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another note might be

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613.5,

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or whatever, and that's we use the low

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level to play.

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Some future work I have, I want to add

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some drums.

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I want to make that keyboard actually

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work,

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and computers and synthesizers are

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the only place you hear a pure sine wave

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like the one we have here,

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so I want to add overtones or other

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octaves above it just to make it

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sound a little bit more realistic.

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I've put notes references and the source

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code up

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at zck.org/emacsconf2020 [updated].

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I'm one of the organizers of EmacsNYC

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check that out. And if you take a look

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or have any thoughts, I'd love to hear

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them, and

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thanks so much for coming to my talk.