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A 4-channel version of Playtune using the interval timers on the Teensy 3.2
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LenShustek/Playtune_Teensy
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Playtune: An Arduino polyphonic music generator Teensy 3.1/3.2 version About Playtune, generally Playtune is a family of music players for Arduino-like microcontrollers. They each intepret a bytestream of commands that represent a polyphonic musical score, and play it using different techniques. (1) The original Playtune, first released in 2011, uses a separate hardware timer to generate a square wave for each note played simultaneously. The timers run at twice the frequency of the note being played, and the interrupt routine flips the output bit. It can play only as many simultaneous notes as there are timers available. The sound quality? Buzzy square waves. https://github.com/LenShustek/arduino-playtune (2) The second ("polling") version uses only one hardware timer that interrupts often, by default at 20 Khz, or once every 50 microseconds. The interrupt routine determines which, if any, of the currently playing notes need to be toggled. It also implements primitive volume modulation by changing the duty cycle of the square wave. The advantage over the first version is that the number of simultaneous notes is not limited by the number of timers, only by the number of output pins. The sound quality is still "buzzy square waves". https://github.com/LenShustek/playtune_poll (3) The third version also uses only one hardware timer interrupting frequently, but uses the hardware digital-to-analog converter on high-performance microntrollers like the Teensy to generate an analog wave that is the sum of stored samples of sounds. The samples are scaled to the right frequency and volume, and any number of instrument samples can be used and mapped to MIDI patches. The sound quality is much better, although not in league with real synthesizers. It currently only supports Teensy. https://github.com/LenShustek/playtune_samp (4) The fourth version is an audio object for the PJRC Audio Library. https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html It allows up to 16 simultaneous sound generators that are internally mixed, at the appropriate volume, to produce one monophonic audio stream. Sounds are created from sampled one-cycle waveforms for any number of instruments, each with its own attack-hold-decay-sustain-release envelope. Percussion sounds (from MIDI channel 10) are generated from longer sampled waveforms of a complete instrument strike. Each generator's volume is independently adjusted according to the MIDI velocity of the note being played before all channels are mixed. www.github.com/LenShustek/Playtune_synth (5) This fifth version is for the Teensy 3.1/3.2, and uses the four Periodic Interval Timers in the Cortex M4 processor to support up to 4 simultaneous notes. It uses less CPU time than the polling version, but is limited to 4 notes at a time. (This was written to experiment with multi-channel multi-Tesla Coil music playing, where I use Flexible Timer Module FTM0 for generating precise one-shot pulses. But I ultimately switched to the polling version to play more simultaneous notes.) www.github.com/LenShustek/Playtune_Teensy For all versions, once a score starts playing, the processing happens in the interrupt routine. Any other "real" program can be running at the same time as long as it doesn't use the timers or the output pins that Playtune is using. Each timer (tone generator) can be associated with any digital output pin, not just the pins that are internally connected to the timer. The exception is when the Teensy version is compiled for playing music on Tesla coils, in which case the outputs must be on digital pins 20, 21, 22, and 23. The easiest way to hear the music is to connect each of the output pins to a resistor (500 ohms, say). Connect other ends of the resistors together and then to one terminal of an 8-ohm speaker. The other terminal of the speaker is connected to ground. No other hardware is needed! But using an amplifier is nicer. **** The public Playtune interface **** There are five public functions and one public variable. void tune_initchan(byte pin) Call this to initialize each of the tone generators you want to use. The argument says which pin to use as output. The pin numbers are the digital "D" pins silkscreened on the Arduino board. Calling this more times than your processor has timers will do no harm, but will not help either. void tune_playscore(byte *score) Call this pointing to a "score bytestream" to start playing a tune. It will only play as many simultaneous notes as you have initialized tone generators; any more will be ignored. See below for the format of the score bytestream. boolean tune_playing This global variable will be "true" if a score is playing, and "false" if not. You can use this to see when a score has finished. void tune_stopscore() This will stop a currently playing score without waiting for it to end by itself. void tune_delay(unsigned int msec) Delay for "msec" milliseconds. This is provided for compatibility with other versions of Playtune that break the "delay' function if you use all of your processor's timers for generating tones. (This one doesn't, and delay() works fine.) void tune_stopchans() This disconnects all the timers from their pins and stops the interrupts. Do this when you don't want to play any more tunes. void tune_speed(unsigned int percent) New for the Teensy version, this changes playback speed to the specified percent of normal. The minimum is percent=20 (1/5 slow speed) and the maximum is percent=500 (5x fast speed). ***** The score bytestream ***** The bytestream is a series of commands that can turn notes on and off, and can start a waiting period until the next note change. Here are the details, with numbers shown in hexadecimal. If the high-order bit of the byte is 1, then it is one of the following commands: 9t nn Start playing note nn on tone generator t. Generators are numbered starting with 0. The notes numbers are the MIDI numbers for the chromatic scale, with decimal 60 being Middle C, and decimal 69 being Middle A at 440 Hz. The highest note is decimal 127 at about 12,544 Hz. except that percussion notes (instruments, really) range from 128 to 255 when relocated from track 9 by Miditones with the -pt option. This version of Playtune ignores those percussion notes. [vv] If ASSUME_VOLUME is set to 1, or the file header tells us to, then we expect a third byte with the volume ("velocity") value from 1 to 127. You can generate this from Miditones with the -v option. (Everything breaks for headerless files if the assumption is wrong!) This version of Playtune ignores volume information. 8t Stop playing the note on tone generator t. Ct ii Change tone generator t to play instrument ii from now on. Miditones will generate this with the -i option. This version of Playtune gives that to the Tesla coil routine, if so compiled, so it can decide which coil(s) to play the note on. F0 End of score: stop playing. E0 End of score: start playing again from the beginning. If the high-order bit of the byte is 0, it is a command to wait. The other 7 bits and the 8 bits of the following byte are interpreted as a 15-bit big-endian integer that is the number of milliseconds to wait before processing the next command. For example, 07 D0 would cause a wait of 0x07d0 = 2000 decimal millisconds or 2 seconds. Any tones that were playing before the wait command will continue to play. Playtune bytestream files generated by later versions of the Miditones progam using the -d option begin with a small header that describe what optional data is present in the file. This makes the file more self-describing, and this version of Playtune uses that if it is present. 'Pt' 2 ascii characters that signal the presence of the header nn The length (in one byte) of the entire header, 6..255 ff1 A byte of flag bits, three of which are currently defined: 80 velocity information is present 40 instrument change information is present 20 translated percussion notes are present ff2 Another byte of flags, currently undefined tt The number (in one byte) of tone generators actually used in this music. We use that the scale the volume when combining simulatneous notes. Any subsequent header bytes covered by the count, if present, are currently undefined and are ignored.The score is stored in Flash memory ("PROGMEM") along with the program, because there's a lot more of that than data memory. **** Where does the score data come from? **** Well, you can write the score by hand from the instructions above, but that's pretty hard. An easier way is to translate MIDI files into these score commands, and I've written a program called "Miditones" to do that. See the separate documentation for that program, which is also open source at https://github.com/lenshustek/miditones **** Nostalgia from me **** Writing Playtune was a lot of fun, because it essentially duplicates what I did as a graduate student at Stanford University in about 1973. That project used the then-new Intel 8008 microprocessor, plus three hardware square-wave generators that I built out of 7400-series TTL. The music compiler was written in Pascal and read scores that were hand-written in a notation I made up, which looked something like this: C Eb 4G 8G+ 2R + F D# This was before MIDI had been invented, and anyway I wasn't a pianist so I would not have been able to record my own playing. I could barely read music well enough to transcribe scores, but I slowly did quite a few of them. MIDI is better! Len Shustek, originally 4 Feb 2011, then updated occasionally over the years.
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A 4-channel version of Playtune using the interval timers on the Teensy 3.2
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