Keyboreal is a piano-like sequencer and instrument that allows you to make music with your computer keyboard. The name comes from the Aurora Borealis, which the visuals roughly imitate.
An instrument for making music in the future. This one also allows you to play in the present. See Wikipedia for more information.
Mac OS X App (tested on macOS Sierra): keyboreal_app.zip
See Build and Install section below to build from source
My motivation with this project was to roughly take the sequencer that's ubiquitous in digital audio software like Garageband and transform it for three- dimensional space, where notes stream past in patterns resembling the Aurora Borealis. In the process, I made a virtual piano that's actually quite enjoyable to learn to play. (Unlike the virtual keyboard in most audio software, this one goes to an octave-and-a-fifth).
I tried to emphasize the lack of formal timing in this project. While Keyboreal can function as a step-sequencer, the time component is an afterthought, a fourth dimension. The user can play the piano for fun, watching the notes fly into the background, and then impose a subsection as a loop afterwards by setting loop markers. Once a loop is established, the user can set the number of gridlines between the markers and quantize the result so each note onset coincides with a gridline.
Another aspect of the sequencer is the focus on being expressive and allowing the user to explore without that seeming dread of getting it right while recording. While the notes eventually fly off screen, seemingly out of mind, they are never lost. The entire history of the piece can be recalled by scrolling. If the user tries to play the piano while it is paused, the notes will stack up right on top of one another in an unappealing fashion. The goal here was not to allow spontaneous musical moments to escape recording.
Prerequisites: You need to Unity to run and build Keyboreal.
Download the following zip file: keyboreal_source.zip
Open the expanded project in Unity and press run. This project relies on the experimental plugin Chunity and has only been verified to work on macOS Sierra with Unity free version 2017.2.0f3 Personal.
The piano is played with the top two alpha rows of the keyboard, stretching all the way to the "Enter" key on the right.
This allows the user to play from a C to a G an octave-and-a-fifth above.
Without any special controls, the user can play the piano as an instrument. Additional controls allow the user to manipulate time, notes, and set up a region as a repeatable loop.
It does not matter which loop region you set down first. Once both loop regions are set, a grid will be displayed between the two loop boundaries, and playback will be repeated within the loop region.
Made by Dylan Freedman