keyjam

keyjam is a simple synthesis tool that allows you to use your computer's keyboard to play and control from a terminal window

Description

This is a synthesizer you can use with your computer keyboard. Its basically a frontend to the sox play command, which produces the actual sythesized sounds you hear.

Because of its design and difficulties in doing things, it lacks (and may never have) certain abilities, like being able to sustain notes until you release the keys and the number of notes you can trigger at the same time is limited to your keyboard drivers, which probably only allow 3 key presses to be registered at once.

Its more of a novelty. But its fun to play with so I thought I'd release it. Surprisingly, the play command is pretty fast so there is almost no delay between pressing a key and hearing a sound. Process forks never sounded so good.

Requirements

You will need to make sure you have four things to use keyjam. Well, four actually.

• Unix, probably Linux would work best since that's where the development is done.
• Working sound (Of course!)
• Perl's Term::ReadKey module.
• sox play command

You can install the last two on Debian with the following command

apt-get install sox libterm-readkey-perl

Usage

To quit keyjam, press <Esc>.

Note: If you're not using a qwerty mapped keyboard, you're going to have to do some work to get this to work properly. A future version will try to detect your keyboard layout.

By default, the home row and top row letter keys are used in a piano style way to play the notes. Below is an example of what keys on a qwerty keyboard map to which piano keys. The note name is shown below the mapped key in parentheses.

_____________________________
|  | | | |  |  | | | | | |  |
|  | | | |  |  | | | | | |  |
|  |w| |e|  |  |t| |y| |u|  |
|  |_| |_|  |  |_| |_| |_|  |
| a | s | d | f | g | h | j |
|(C)|(D)|(E)|(F)|(G)|(A)|(B)|
|___|___|___|___|___|___|___|

You can print the current keyboard mapping using <F1> or ?.

Here are some other keys that can be used to control keyjam:

• <PgDown>, <PgUp> - Change octave (down/up)
• <F3>, <F4> - Change instrument (down/up)
• <F11>, <F12> - Change detune range effect. (down/up)

Demos

It would be great to see people demostrating keyjam in online videos or something like that. Please e-mail at the contact address below if you'd like to share yours and I'll include it here.

Development

If you want to change the key mappings, you can define a new one in the program itself, just search for the line, my %notes_keymaps and you'll see where you can define your own mapping. Mapping is done by listing the keys that correspond to each note on a twelve tone scale in the western tonality system. Spaces used in the mapping string are ignored and stripped. You can map additional octaves onto your keymap by continuing on after you reach the 12th note. You will need to prefix the following octave with an underscore character. keyjam will detect this automatically and setup the next octave automatically. You can also skip mappings of certain notes by using an underscore character(_).

In the future I may turn this into more of a curses like program that always displays the keyboard and current settings.

License

keyjam is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. Please see the file COPYING included with the software.

Contact

You may contact the author Mark Krenz at deltaray _ slugbug + org (tr _+ @.)