Reactive-balsa
Reactive-balsa is a live MIDI event processor based on the Reactive-banana framework and ALSA. (Thus it is currently bound to Linux.) It is the successor of the package streamed, that uses a kind of arrow types.
The MIDI event processor can be used for accompaniment, gags, games and more. It is usually inserted between a MIDI input device such as a USB piano keyboard and a MIDI controlled synthesizer, say an internal software synthesizer or an external hardware synthesizer.
Some of the included examples:
- arpeggiator: play a pattern according to pressed keys
- generate a beat with controllable tempo
- instrument cycling: every note is played with a different instrument
- LFO-controlled change of MIDI controllers
- simulate playing chords on a guitar
- interval trainer
- keyboard with mirrord order of keys: perfect support for lefties :-)
The reactive programming paradigma has precisely the right abstractions that we need for MIDI event processing:
- Events are discrete MIDI events for key press and release, knob turning and fader move, instrument change,
- Behaviours are things like current position of a knob or fader or the set of currently pressed keys.
This becomes especially useful for the arpeggiator. There are several ways to obtain a set of keys:
- The actual set of pressed keys.
- Latched keys: Every key press toggles between press and release
- Group latched keys: A chord is hold until a new chord is played.
- Serial latch: A queue of fixed length holds pressed keys. Newly pressed keys release old keys.
And there are many ways to generate MIDI events from a set of keys:
- cycle them up or down, or play them in ping-pong mode,
- play them randomly,
- play algorithmic patterns, like de-Bruijn sequences or k-nary cross sums, Gray codes or Johnson-Trotter-permutations,
- play the set of keys with random inversions.
| Hackage | http://hackage.haskell.org/package/reactive-balsa |
| Repository | darcs get http://code.haskell.org/~thielema/reactive-balsa/
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