EmacsConf 2020 talk: WAVEing at Repetitive Repetitive Repetitive Music

I presented WAVEing at Repetitive Repetitive Repetitive Music at EmacsConf 2020. Video can be found at this EmacsConf page.

If you enjoyed my talk, you might appreciate EmacsNYC, a meetup I co-organize.

Abstract

During quarantine, I found myself spending time with an Android app. One of the features this app has is composing music that loops endlessly. As with many things, I wondered how much better this feature would be, if only it was inside Emacs.

This talk explains how I made zmusic, my implementation inside Emacs, with detours through Emacs text properties, font rendering, the WAVE file format, and music theory. And hopefully at the end, we'll have something worth listening to.

zmusic: Code & Presentation

The source can be found at https://hg.sr.ht/~zck/zmusic/.

This presentation was performed in zpresent, a presentation framework I wrote. The presentation source is available.

WAVE References

• http://soundfile.sapp.org/doc/WaveFormat/
• http://www.lightlink.com/tjweber/StripWav/WAVE.html
• http://www.topherlee.com/software/pcm-tut-wavformat.html

New Emacs Knowledge!

I got some assistance from the Emacs Stack Exchange.

• Buttons can highlight more than you want.
• Saving raw bytes to a file is hard!
• There was a question about making major modes. I used define-derived-mode to make this mode. It's really useful! For more information, I recorded a talk about making major modes a few years ago, at an EmacsNYC meeting.

It was an honor to present as part of this conference. Thanks to the organizers, presenters, and attendees.