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Show HN: Pianocat

javier.io

48 pointschilicuil17 comments

This is really cool. For anyone else who wants to run this on Mac OS X, try installing sox first (brew install sox). That's all I had to do and then I was up and running.

A quick melody from a favorite song that I transcribed: "D4 A4 D5 F5 D5 A4 D4 A4 D5 E5 D5 A4 G3 G4 A#4 D#5 A#4 G4 G3 G4 A#4 D5 A#4 G4 A3 E4 A4 D5 A4 E4 A3 E4 A4 C#5 A4 E4"

I love to see the command line put to good use like this!

This reminds me of a cartridge I used to have on my Commodore 64 (don't remember the name off-hand) that came with a piano overlay that you actually sat on top of the C64 keyboard. The overlay was designed to press certain keys down on the keyboard when you hit the piano keys.

Great memories!

Quite possibly Music Maker: http://retro-treasures.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/commodore-64-m...

Though there may have been other ones too.

There were certainly lots of "piano" programs that used the keyboard that mostly would work with the same overlays.

Inspired by this I have uploaded some sample piano notes (.ogg) for fellow hackers to use for their piano apps!

See https://github.com/mcapodici/pianosounds

Which keyboard layout makes it easy to type ñ, {, and } on the same row as j, k, and l? I guessed Brazilian (based on the EN/PT/ES on your profile), but that doesn't seem quite right according to Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_keyboard_layout#/med...

That would be a Spanish QWERTY keyboard: http://sdcdn1.s3.amazonaws.com/images/vocabulary/spanishkeyb...

Thanks

ñ is not in the Portuguese alphabet. In Portuguese, the palatal nasal sound is usually represented by "nh", e.g. Spanish "baño" -> Portuguese "banho".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_nasal

Stickiness is music is when the mind can predict what comes next without ever actually hearing what comes next before.

Not necessarily. That's familiarity. But a familiar piece might not be sticky at all, just boring.

Exactly. Otherwise the same note played over and over at an even tempo would be "sticky" (which is nonsense).

"..without ever actually hearing what comes next before."

Still not relevant. There are several studies on the impact of music and the role of familiarity, structure, anticipation and such. There's even one decicated to the use of such musical notions in the music of the Beatles ( http://www.amazon.com/Songwriting-Secrets-Beatles-Dominic-Pe... ).

For one, sticky songs (hooks) can also be unpredictable/unexpected. E.g. you're not able to predict what will follow from the first part you hear, but it sticks to your mind after you do hear it in full.

Second, there are hooks where you DO hear "what comes next before" (e.g. they are based on repeatition of notes in the core hook) and that doesn't stop them being sticky.

How can you be familiar with something you've never heard before?

Very easily. If it follows a structure (melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, etc) that's the same with other things you've heard before.

Why is the note D# mapped to R instead of E?

http://milkytracker.org/

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