iGetIt! Music

Online music education courseware for non-musicians who want to learn how to write their own rock songs.

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Name: Jim Plamondon
Location: Austin, Texas, United States

This blog documents the development of JIMS iGetIt! Music System (JIMS). JIMS' goal is to help you Understand Music in 24 Hours™, if you are (a) a non-musician (b) who wants to learn how to write your own rock songs. Requiring no instrument other than your own computer, and without using traditional notation, JIMS is being designed to deliver a deep understanding of tonal structure...in just 24 hours.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

First Flash control: PitchSlider

To develop my forthcoming music education courseware using Adobe's Flash/Flex/AIR, I'm developing a suite of components that display and control musical information.  This is going well, considering. Although I have a Computer Science degree, I haven't written a line of code since 1992...17 years ago.  Climbing up the Flash/Flex/AIR/ActionScript/Eclipse/XML learning curve is fun but challenging.

My first Flash control is a slider that allows the user to choose a frequency (it works best if you drag the thumb slowly):


No big deal, but writing it helped me understand a lot of stuff, including Flash 10's new sound synthesis API SampleDataEvent. 

I've seen other posts in which the source code to such controls is easily available (by right-clicking on the control and choosing "View Source" from a pop-up menu), but I don't know how to support that feature. I can't find any documentation for it; apparently it's so "obvious" that it is never described. If a reader could please tell me how to add support for Flash's "View Source" feature -- in full newbie-tutorial detail -- I'd be happy to make the code available for this and subsequent iGetIt! controls.  (iGetIt!'s proprietary value is in the patent-pending iGetIt! Music System and the lessons based on it, not in its Flash controls.)

I expect to use the PitchSlider control (or something like it) to show the student that musical pitch (frequency) is continuous, varying in a smooth and unbroken manner. Some frequencies have names (such as 440Hz, which is named A4), and some do not, but all are musically equal. The structure of music is the same for all frequencies.  Obviously, this ignores a ton of psychoacoustic issues like the human ear's range of hearing and critical band, but... close enough, as a first approximation.

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