Interactive Drum Machine

Becca Suchower

Project Goals

For my project, I wanted to create some kind of virtual instrument, since music and building instruments are passions of mine. I decided to create a virtal drum machine, which loops drum beats based on user input. I had three main goals for this project, listed below:

1. Create a looping drum machine with user interaction
2. Create a color-changing display to accompany the audio
3. Learn a new library (Pygame) that works with sounds and displays

Features

• Drum Beats - Contains sound samples for a cowbell, hi-hat, kick, open hi-hat, ride, snare, and tom (free samples from 99Sounds).
• Metronome - Continuously plays a metronome sound to communicate the beat to the user.
• Color Changing Display - Changes the background of the display to a random color (within a specified RGB color range) with each key press.
• User Input and Looping - Pressing the keys on the home row (A-J) once starts looping the sound, and pressing it a second time stops the current looping.

Installation Instructions

To run this program, you will first need to install Python and Pygame. The Python installation instructions can be found here. Follow the installation for your preferred operating system. This program uses the built in Python libraries time and random, which are both imported within the code.

The Pygame installation instructions can be found here, or you can run the command py -m pip install -U pygame --user in your command window.

Project Download Links

To download this project, you can clone the repository by running the command git clone https://github.com/bsuchower/interactive-programs.git in your command window.

Project GitHub Page

My project repository is located at https://github.com/bsuchower/interactive-programs.

About Me

I’m a mechanical engineering student and current junior at Olin College of Engineering! Olin was founded in 1997 with the mission to reinvent undergraduate engineering education. Our curriculum is interdisciplinary and project-based, and focuses on working in teams beginning in the first semester. This project was completed as a final project for an Olin course called Software Design.

My email is [email protected]. Feel free to contact me with any questions about this project!

Attribution

This project uses open-source drum samples from 99Sounds. This sound library is free to download at https://99sounds.org/drum-samples/.

Pygame’s documentation was extremely helpful for this project, and is located at https://www.pygame.org/docs/.