The play command can take a digitised sound and play notes. The notes can vary in pitch, length and tempo so that quite passable tunes can be constructed using a digitised sound. The beauty of this is that long tunes take up only a tiny space. On my "101 Australian Folk Songs" stack all the words and all the music can still fit on one floppy disk! The drawback is that the tunes sound a bit mechanical. Here's a sample tune called Brisbane Ladies
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play Fiddle tempo 200 "59q 64q 64q 59q 64h 64e 66e 67q 66q 64q 64e 62e 59q" play Fiddle tempo 200 "59q 64q 64q 59q 64h 64e 66e 67q 69q 67q 66h" play Fiddle tempo 200 "66e 66e 67q 66q 67q 69q 67q 69q 71e 69e 67q 64q 64e 62e 59q" play Fiddle tempo 200 "71e 69e 67q 64q 64q 64e 62e 59q 57q 59q 64q 63q 64h" |
Copy the script and paste into a button on your stack. Of course you need a sound resource called Fiddle or else you can try it by replacing Fiddle in the script with Harpsichord which is build in to hyperCard.
Instead of numbers you can use the names of the note so that 60 is middle C and 61 would be C#. I find the numbers are better for 2 reasons
Firstly if you use the note letter system you have to specify octave changes (c3 is middle C, c4 the octave above and c2 the octave below
Secondly if you use the number system you can change the pitch of a tune by adding or subtracting the same whole number from each note in the tune.
The length of each note is specified by the letter following the note as shown below
In the latest version of HyperCard the soundChannel property reflects the channel through which sound is played. By immediately switching channels and playing new sounds, several sounds can be played nearly simultaneously as in this example
on mouseUp put the soundChannel into chan play harpsichord c e g wait 2 seconds set the soundChannel to 1 play harpsichord c2 set the soundChannel to 2 play harpsichord e3 set the soundChannel to 3 play harpsichord g set the soundChannel to 4 play harpsichord e2 set the soundChannel to 5 play harpsichord g4 set the soundChannel to 6 play harpsichord c5 set the soundChannel to chan end mouseUp |
Copy this script and paste it into a button in your stack. When you click on it it will play random music till you click again! It plays a pentatonic music (only the black notes). If you have a different sound resource in your stack just replace the word harpsichord in the script with the name of the new sound
on mouseUp
put "harpsichord" into instrument
put "51 54 56 58 61 63 66 68 70 73 75 56 58 61 63 66 68 51 54 56" into notes
put "s e e e e e3 e e e e e e3 e s s s s s s t q h. w" into duration
put number of words in notes into num
put number of words in duration into dur
set hilite of me to true
repeat until the mouseClick
play instrument word random(num) of notes & word random(dur) of duration
wait until the sound is done
end repeat
set hilite of me to false
end mouseUp
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