Metronome

I am a student of classical violin. With classical vocal music, which I also learn, it is easy to keep track of the rythms and positions within beat patterns, with your hands. For more details on the beat patterns please refer to my classical music pages. However, while playing the violin (or any instrument for that matter), your hands are obviously strung up (pun unintended). So a way is necessary for "displaying" the beat patterns and the positions within a beat pattern.

Advanced players can do this mentally without any aid. But until that stage is reached we all could use some help. This program does exactly that. This lets you create your own beat patterns and visually represent each beat (for example beat position 1 with the first finger on your hand and so on). The "beat pattern" file format is XML. This program is far from completion but I have put it here so that anyone interested in it can try it out and give me feedback on how it can be improved (apart from the obvious bug-fixes!!).

Main Sections

• The image in the centre shows the current position diagramatically.

• The list of cycles (or beat patterns) are in the list box on the top left.

• The tool bar contains buttons to to start, stop, forward, and rewind the currently selected pattern.

• The speed (number of beats per minute) can be selected in the track bar at the bottom.

• The tick pattern (how each beat is sounded) can be selected from the "Tick Pattern" drop down box below the speed slider.

Beats File

• The beats file is a text file in a simple format. Click here for a sample (included in the package).

  The file consists of four parts:

  • Sounds Section: Specifies all the sound files that are used in the file.
  • Image Section: Specifies all the images that can be displayed. Most widely used file formats are supported.
  • Tick Patterns (or Time Signatures): Tick patterns that can be used in the metronome.
  • Cycles: Each cycle is a list of beats. A cycle can have arbitrary number of beats.

  Installation

  • Click here to download this program. The file is an archive which contains all the installation files for this program. Extract the contents of this archive to a temporary directory (eg c:\temp).
  • Execute the installer (setup.exe) and follow the installation process. Once extracted, execute the main exe file in the set from the directory where this program was installed to.
  • On the first use of the program, you may be prompted to select a "configuration file". This is not the same as the beat description file. The configuration file (eg c:\program files\metronome\metronome.cfg) is used for storing global configuration pertaining to the application (eg window widths and other info).
  • Once the configuration file is selected, open the included file "beats.xml" and off you go. This file is only a sample and can be edited to suit individual needs.

  To Do

  I plan to do the following changes to the program:
  • Use more realisitic pictures of human hands rather than quickly created images with basic shapes.
  • The speed (in BPM) will vary slightly depending on the speeed of the computer. At the moment after every refresh and painting, the program "sleeps" for a certain to induce the delay. However, the speed at which the program paints depends on the speed of the computer and applications running in the background. In the future, I plan to calculate average of this "computational" time and subtract it from the "sleep" time to get a closer "average" delay than a standard delay between beats.