Context: Making Sounds with Piezos

Table of contents

  1. Primer on Sound
  2. Making this easier
  3. Find out more

Primer on Sound

First, it’s important to understand a little about sound and how sound works…

While written for Processing (a creative coding language for computer graphics), this article provides an excellent primer on sound synthesis. Start by reading: Sound by R. Luke DuBois and Wilm Thoben up to Example 1, 2: Synthesizer

Making this easier

Download pitches.h. Add it to your project folder and include it in your main code file by adding the following line at the top:

#include "pitches.h"

What does this do?

In the previous example we had to manually write the frequency for each tone we wanted to create

int melody[] = {1908,2551,2551,2273,2551,0,2024,1908};

The pitches includes a set of definitions that make it much easier to reference notes. With pitches.h included we can write this as:

int melody[] = {NOTE_C4,NOTE_G3,NOTE_G3,NOTE_A3,NOTE_G3,0,NOTE_B3,NOTE_C4};

Find out more