chips@tekchips.UUCP (Chip Schnarel) (10/07/85)
OK, I know that this is not the right place for this but then I bet you people know the answer so... I'm contemplating a project to bring together a few of my hobbies/interests/ career. Namely woodworking, music and electronics. The project would be a "player" harpsichord. Starting from a harpsichord kit, I would like to add electro-mechanical controls to play it from a computer. I'm primarily a hardware engineer so I don't want to do too much software. Device drivers are about my speed. A musical composition program is more than I want to take on. The BIG question is: is MIDI an appropriate interface for what I want to do? The computer would be a Macintosh. I have seen several music composition programs for the Mac. I have also read that people are driving MIDI interfaces from the Mac. So I should be able to build a computer which attaches to the harpsichord and takes MIDI in, and drives solenoid controls out, right? Then all I have to do is drive the computer from the right program on the Mac. A harpsichord was chosen for a number of reasons. They are available in kit form. The strings are plucked rather than struck making the keyboard velocity insensitive and the electro-mech interface that much simpler, and the harpsichord can play a broad range of music in any key with a pleasent (to me anyway) sound. Yes, I know that this isn't a synthesizer, but it seems to me that any musical instrument could be described by a subset of the synthesizer protocol. OK, so where do I find a definition of MIDI at the right technical level for this sort of implementation? If MIDI is not the appropriate interface, are there others defined for this sort of thing? For the purists out there who question the why of this project, it's because I can't play worth a darn. Something about working in real time I think. Anyway I'm sure that the posting includes several interesting topics for discussion. Thanks, Chip Schnarel tektronix!tekchips!chips