Piano
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This is a simple piano-like instrument. Press keys on the keypad to play it.
Be ready, though, that your device will not allow you to play more than
two keys at one -- it is a rather prevalent design constraint.

If your device happens to have a touchscreen, you may play the keyboard
directly on screen. Changing octave on screen does not work yet, though.

Use arrow keys to change octave of the keyboard.

You may change volume in the likewise named formular.

If your device allows to switch timbre, a special formular
will be available.

Conversely, if your device does not have a tone generating capability
at all, the program will show an error dialog and shut itself down.

The settings you change are saved upon quitting the program.

History
-------

The program began it's life as an exact copy of the Piano MIDlet
from the book "Wireless Java Developing with J2ME, Second Edition"
by Jonathan Knudsen, published by Apress, ISBN 1590590775 .

Seeing that twelve keys on an usual cell phone keypad are
as many as keys in an octave, I modified the MIDlet to be controlled
by keypad buttons only.

After using the resulting application and unnerving my choirmaster
doing so, I approached some choir members from the mezzo-soprano voice
and asked them about suggestions for improvements; the suggestions
were:

* making sounds of arbitrarily length and loudness
* ability to switch timbres

These suggestions went to the issues #4 and #1 respectively.
The rest was technical.


Source Code
-----------

The source code is packaged into the package piano. The code was
separated after the MVC pattern as much as possible, the class
PianoCanvas being both controller and view, the player classes
(TonePlayer and MIDIPlayer) being views and the class Piano
being both the program launcher and the model.

The source code is well-commented and well-documented.