Talk:TamTam

• 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 MOD files are rather outdated AFAIK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.

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

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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 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)