how I cured my lack of musical prowess

Hello all! Have you ever wanted to create musical tunes on the fly? If you have, then look no further. This is my first Arduino project for the year and it is a simple Arduino Piano.

Components and Supplies

Wiring

The wiring for this contraption is very simple. The buttons are connected to D5 to D10 and the piezo buzzer goes into D11 of the Arduino. They also all go into GND.

Coding

The coding for the piano is unfortunately a little more complicated than the wiring, although still relatively simple.

I first defined the musical note frequencies as constants. These frequencies represent different pitches in Hertz. You can use any notes you want, but I have used the notes C – A from the fourth octave in this code.

Then, I created two arrays and a buzz variable to make the process easier:

notes[], which contain the pin numbers for the input buttons (10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5).
tones[], which contain the corresponding frequencies (C, D, E, F, G, A) that are played when the corresponding button is pressed.
buzz contains the pin number for the buzzer that plays the tones (11).

In the setup() function, I used a loop to iterate through the notes[] array to initialize each button as an input with an internal pull-up resistor using pinmode(). The pull-up resistor ensures that the input pin reads HIGH(no button pressed) by default and reads LOW when the button is pressed.

The loop() function continuously checks the state of each button using multiple if statements. The program checks each button in sequence using digitalRead(). If a button is pressed(LOW), the corresponding note is played using the tone() function, which sends the frequency to the buzzer connected to pin 11. If no button is pressed, noTone(buzz) is called to stop the sound.

#define C 262
#define D 294
#define E 330
#define F 349
#define G 392
#define A 440


const int notes[] = {10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5};
const int tones[] = {C, D, E, F, G, A};
const int buzz = 11;




void setup() {
  for (int i = 0; i < 6; i++) {
    pinMode(notes[i], INPUT);
    digitalWrite(notes[i], HIGH); 
  }
}



void loop() {
  while(1){
    if(digitalRead(notes[0]) == LOW){
      tone(buzz, tones[0]);
    } else if (digitalRead(notes[1]) == LOW){
      tone(buzz, tones[1]);
    } else if (digitalRead(notes[2]) == LOW){
      tone(buzz, tones[2]);
    } else if (digitalRead(notes[3]) == LOW){
      tone(buzz, tones[3]);
    } else if (digitalRead(notes[4]) == LOW){
      tone(buzz, tones[4]);
    } else if (digitalRead(notes[5]) == LOW){
      tone(buzz, tones[5]);
    } else {
      noTone(buzz);
    }
  }
}

Here is how it should look and work at the end:

Thank you for reading this blog post. I hope you have a nice day!

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Comments

2 Responses to “how I cured my lack of musical prowess”

mcrompton

17 October 2024

Good post, Felix! You’ve demonstrated a good understanding of introductory Arduino. I’m curious to know if you have done any work with Arduinos prior to this assignment? What did you learn through this assignment?

1. fhang27
  
  21 October 2024
  
  I have worked with Arduino before this project. This project was a refresher on Arduino for me, as I haven’t worked with it in almost a year. Additionally, I learned how to use the buzzer and buttons through this assignment.