Talk:TamTam

• Hi team,

Great activity! A teacher trainer in Uruguay is asking if there is any training material in Spanish which she can use to train teachers on your applications.

I found a Youtube overview. If you list all the Tam Tam training material you have in any language that will also help.

Keep up the great work. I can connect you directly with the teacher if you want to get more feedback or work with them directly.

Thanks,

Gregorio 14:42, 9 May 2008 (EDT)

• Hi... I have an idea to create an activity for exploring phonetics using the Int'l Phonetic Alphabet, something like [IPA Help]. I thought it could be done either as another part of TamTam or by cloning TamTam, by substituting IPA characters for the icons and IPA sounds. I've downloaded the TamTam source code via git. It looks like all 4 existing TamTam activities share the same set of sounds. So for a separate sound inventory I'd need to create a separate application, correct? Can you advise me on how to copy-and-modify TamTam to use a different Resource folder?

Thanks, Lars (larsspam at huttar dot net)

• Do you know about the [Freesound Database?]

It is a really great site containing only Creative Commons licensed sounds all generated by the users of the site. It could be a great way to get musicians/sound recorders to collaborate on creating sounds for the TamTam project, and possibly other OLPC projects that need sounds.

I will email the webmasters, to see if they know about OLPC.

--Tomhannen 07:40, 9 December 2006 (EST)

• Is TamTam based on CSOUND?

yes

• Does TamTam a synthesiser, i.e. does it rely on synthesised instruments?

yes. It uses Csound

• Is TamTam a sampler, i.e. can one record short audio samples to use as the instrument sounds?

yes

• If TamTam is a sampler, could it read and play tracker files, commonly called MODs.

mmm..we'll have to envisage that perhaps. MOD files are rather outdated AFAIK

I copied the paragraph and links below from another page. I asked this because this is a low-storage way of doing sampled music and the OLPC is a really low storage device.

Music trackers (or mod players) do exactly this and were very popular back in the days when PC's like Amiga and Atari were common. I remember running tracker software on MS-DOS on a 286 computer. This is well suited to a limited storage machine like the OLPC. Some background on tracker software is in this article. There are at least three trackers/modplayers for Linux:

• http://www.soundtracker.org/
• http://www.reduz.com.ar/cheesetronic/
• http://timidity.sourceforge.net/

• Can TamTam be wholly controlled through the keyboard or does it require a pointing device?

the ascii keyb and, in all liklihood any device fed throughthe USB ports and the audio input

How hard will it be to adapt TamTam to the majority of OLPCs which do not have an ASCII keyboard but use Amharic, Thai, Chinese, etc.

The keyboard does not use its "characters" and the information sent is based on its position on the layout and the same key, no matter the language, will always yield the same result. There is (hopefully) no text in TamTam.

---

In the article page, if one clicks on the picture an enlarged view is shown.

---

In the article ...

> This is a condensation of the talk I gave at OLPC in Boston on June 14th 2004.

Is that meant to be 2006?

bien sur!

The date has now been corrected in the article page. -- Hi. I can´t find Tam Tam project anywhere. I asume it is not ready for download, but still I would like to see the open source project and see if I can join up...

• I am a researcher in technology for music education and I am interested to join the Tam tam project for bringing my ideas. How may I do?

Certainly! who are you and how can you be reached? the first thing would be to download the sources and examine the code! You could also post some of your ideas in this discussion.

Collaborative = TamTamJam?

Hi! While doing some cosmetics I took the liberty (while trying to note it) to christen the fourth collaborative 'incarnation' of the TamTam series as TamTamJam... I just wanted to note that the name is totally unofficial and non-sanctioned by any member of the TamTam community... so the name is just a 'dummy'. Sorry if this may cause problems, and feel free to revert the edition :) --Xavi 15:48, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

I like it! -- ethrop.

Old comment

On the TamTam soundbank: the first release of TamTam will focus on instruments from these countries :

   * Brasil
   * China
   * India
   * Nigeria
   * Thailand

User feedback

• In TamTam Jam, there are many keys which are silent. Including several in the home row. This is an obstacle for young/inexperienced/demo users. Ideas:
  • Make '.' and '/' non-silent. ',' is already a duplicate of 'q', so continue the pattern with '.' a duplicate of 'w', and '/' of 'e'.
  • Continue the scale through o, p, [, and ]. Unless the resulting sound is horrible.
  • Have a second (and default) keyboard layout where "all" keys make noise. Perhaps two instruments?

MitchellNCharity 01:05, 21 August 2007 (EDT)

How do I make it make sound? AFAICT the speaker volume is up (we heard sound from another app), but cannot figure out how to make this app play anything. Can you point us to somethign that tells how to use it? From the post above, I'm guessing that striking keys on the keyboard is supposed to make sound, but so far ours does nothing. -- DBooth 21:10, 21 December 2007 (EST)

Okay, apparently the app was stuck somehow. After restarting it I was able to get it to make some sounds. -- DBooth 21:24, 21 December 2007 (EST)

---

It would be nice if the activities for younger children could be installed without the more advanced ones. That way, the harder programs don't clutter the icon bar and cause confusion. Mattdm 13:52, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Sugar 0.82, which is included in the latest OLPC software release, lets you mark which installed activities you want to appear in the Home View. Enjoy. --Walter 02:16, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

How to install TamTam

I have download and setup Sugar as instructed. I can't find TamTam activity in it, so I download and build it. But when I run it, nothing is displayed. Could somebody give tutorial how to install TamTam? 124.158.134.59 02:14, 15 December 2007 (EST)

Licensing?

The source files in the repository seem to lack licensing information. —Joe 17:36, 21 January 2008 (EST)

Note about the icons

In recent builds, the icons for tamtammini and tamtamjam have been swapped (tamtammini is the single drum--you only play one instrument at a time; tamtamjam is the combo; you can play multiple voices at once). --Walter 11:26, 28 March 2008 (EDT)

More information split into individual pages, naming

Since TamTam has been split into four individual activities, I think we should create individual pages for them all. In this way, we can have the incredibly useful, helpful TamTam help images integrated into the wiki pages for each activity (without it being too much for one page).

Sidebar--I also feel that having "TamTam" in front of each individual activity's name is simply too different from the other activities' names.

e.g., on my XO, I have...

• Chat
• Browse
• Write
• Record
• TamTamMini
• Etoys
• Pippy
• Calculate
• Terminal
• Measure
• TamTamJam
• TamTamEdit
• TamTamSynthLab

Which of these activity names stand out as sounding more intimidating and potentially confusing?

The TamTam suite contains my favorite activities :), the first thing I do when I show new people my XO is rock out keyboard style in TamTamMini. Let's do what we can to make these activities something that kids play with first on the laptop, enjoy all of the features of, and learn a TON about music from (looks at the auditory learners).

--Bjordan 15:58, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

SynthLab Idea

Greetings from Indiana, USA!

I often wish that SynthLab had a function that extends the sound indefinitely until the key is unpressed. This function is already in MiniTamTam, could it possibly be extended to SynthLab at all?

Thanks, Alex

Nice idea. I don't know if the maintainers watch this page. Perhaps post an email with your suggestion of the iaep list at lists.sugarlabs.org --Walter 21:28, 23 May 2010 (UTC)