Anyhoo, let’s start by discussing a coding thing I worked on last year. A prototype Accordion emulator written in Java<\/p>\n
Screenshot below, you can download the program here<\/a>. (Requires Java).<\/p>\n This program started as a simple attempt to generate a Stradella<\/a> button map that I could refer to while playing the piano accordion. I wanted to draw up my own as a bit of fun in remembering my music theory (each row is a perfect fifth interval from the one below it). After some annoying attempts to draw the thing up by hand, then some fiddling around in Photoshop, I concluded that it’d be faster to write a program to generate the thing for me.<\/p>\n Once I’d done that, I decided it’d be fun to make the buttons play notes when they were pressed. Things snowballed from there.<\/p>\n Inspired by a program<\/a> I’d spotted a few years ago I realised that I could use a keyboard with the program and could map a number of keyboard keys quite easily to the bass button keys as both key layouts contain diagonal rows. Quite fortunately, a standard keyboard should offer 12 rows and four columns of keys allowing for every note in a scale to be represented in my emulator. Although the focus of the program is on the bass keys, I added in a section of the piano keyboard as well to allow for a bit of experimentation with melody and bass.<\/p>\n Finally, I flipped the keyboards so that they correspond more intuitively to what a player would expect to see while playing, as the buttons face away from the player. This also became handy for when I wanted to practice accordion and didn’t have a mirror handy to check my hand placements \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n As you can tell I’ve had a few changes of heart in naming this program – it started as AccordionIng<\/em> which naturally became Accordin’<\/em>. I’ve started thinking of it as In Accord<\/em> lately, not that I’ve been really thinking about it lately. Other people tend to just call it Accordion Hero<\/a>.<\/em> One day I’d like to turn this into something like an “Accordion Hero” type game or a music tutor. That would probably call for a rewrite. For now, I’m quite pleased that it allows me to practice with my headphones in and not bothering other people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Edit 8th May 2015: I’ve been alerted to the fact that in Windows the audio sounds decidedly piano-like. This is not intentional! I will see if I can fix this at a later date.] Well March Blog Badness Madness begins today! This challenge, having snuck up on me, has left me racking my brain for … <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,101],"tags":[102,53],"class_list":{"0":"entry","1":"post","2":"publish","3":"author-admin","4":"post-221","6":"format-standard","7":"category-code-2","8":"category-music","9":"post_tag-accordion","10":"post_tag-java"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ale.chenonetta.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/accordion_screenshot.png\" "\\"accordion_screenshot\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n