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Programming On a Piano Keyboard

Posted by Soulskill on from the well-tempered-claiverlang dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Here's a fun project: engineer Yuriy Guts built a Visual Studio extension that lets people program using MIDI instruments. You can write code letter by letter on a piano keyboard. Granted, it's not terribly efficient, but it's at least artistic — you can compose music that is also a valid computer program. Somewhat more usefully, it also allows you to turn a simple MIDI input device, like a trigger pad into a set of buttons that will run tests, push/pull code, or other tasks suitable for automation. The extension is open source and open to contributions.

8 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. That's going to be embarrassing... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...you play one of Chopin's Études, and a Perl program falls out...

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:That's going to be embarrassing... by msauve · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's nothing. Play something by John Cage, and you get Windows OS.

      --
      "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  2. PHBs by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 3, Funny

    Beware! Write your stream encryptor in a lydian mode and the PHB will come back and ask for it in phrygrian.

    --
    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
  3. I dub thee by Horshu · · Score: 2

    Loom#

  4. Wow, programming with a keyboard by ghn · · Score: 2

    A keyboard is a keyboard. Might not be qwerty but it is still a effing keyboard.

  5. Did that 23 years ago by hyc · · Score: 2

    with my Atari ST. It was trivial then since the same chip controlled both the keyboard and MIDI ports, just redirect one of the intercept vectors to catch the incoming MIDI packets and feed the notes to the keyboard buffer.

    It's more fun to do this with a Zeta MIDI violin. I programmed it to move the mouse pointer on glissandos too, could do pretty much anything without touching keyboard or mouse.

    --
    -- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
  6. As a hardware engineer.... by anubi · · Score: 2

    As far as I am concerned... just because a MIDI port was originally used for keyboards does not mean its limited to that. A MIDI port is really quite versatile and can be used for many other things.

    Now, one thing I used to like a lot is the 15-pin game and MIDI port was on damned near every PC, and very few people had it tied up. It was simply a great way for me to get data in and out of the computer. All I needed to do was coin a protocol on my Borland C++ compiler, and talk to the port. I could always design hardware on the other end to talk to it. Shift registers. It was very easily optically isolated, which again made it ideal for what I was doing where I did not want to risk a very expensive PC because I had a ground fault somewhere.

    I really liked that port. I used it a lot when I was building custom things controlled by a PC in the early DOS days.

    Another neat protocol out these days is DMX. Used for light controllers.

    They may make these for one thing, but when you see just what it is and how it works, they have usually made something that will work for a lot of stuff.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

  7. Shoutout for Godel Escher Bach by cpm99352 · · Score: 2

    The ridiculous summary suggesting that garbage produced from a computer program could be considered music immediately reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach, where music and its relevance to AI form much of the book. The book (unlike the article) has meaningful thoughts on Chopin, Bach and AI.

    Anyone seriously interested in music & computers needs to read this book now.