Sound Sequencing Mouse

I saw this cool sound sequencer ( arduino punk console ). I don’t much about sound and that kind of stuff, but i thought it was quite nifty. And I had just gotten a ps2-mouse to work with the arduino. And hmmm, I had to use it for something. So why not try to make a sound sequencer with it ?

So I started hacking away. Unfortunately I don’t have any nice video or sound clip, but then again its more like a noisemaker and its just a mess of wires. I’ll try to get something up soon.

But it does work, you have to take my word for it or download the sourcecode and wire up your arduino and try it out.

How does it work ?

There a two modes of operation “play mode” or “sequencing mode”, and it shift between modes by clicking the middelbutton (mousewheel button) and it starts out in sequence mode.

sequencing mode

  • moving the mouse changes the frequency of the sound. It’s very simple the more you move, the more it changes (just by (X + Y) *magic_number)
  • pressing the right mouse button reduces the duration of the sound
  • pressing the left mouse button increases the duration
  • turning the mousewheel selects a tone in the sequence, either an existing or adds a new one to the sequence.

play mode

  • it plays the sequence of tones you’ve recorded.
  • the mouse wheel changes the playback speed.

So it keeps track of both a duration and a frequency, it uses a queue and its possible to add sounds to both ends. I haven’t yet hit a maximum but since its in a int array my guess is that it should be able to hold a lot 100 or 1000 of tones. And it should be possible to do some bytepacking to reduce the memory requirements, but since you have to enter each sound manually and there are no persistent storage you really don’t need that to hold a lot of tones.

Sound Sequencing Mouse sourcecode

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