[LAU] Touchpad to MIDI

[Lorenzo Sutton]

Hi Will,

On 27/07/21 09:22, Will Godfrey wrote:
> Does anyone know of software that can generate MIDI messages from a touchpad?

If, as I understand it, you mean a latptop touchpad (i.e. thing used 
instead of a real mouse with your finger :-) ) Pure Data can definitely 
do it in many different ways.

The Pd 'vanilla' way would probably be using a canvas object(s) and 
tracking movement as you 'drag' them around.

There are a bunch of Pd externals (i.e. libraries not included in Pd you 
need to compile and install separately), which can also do this in 
various ways. [1]

Once you have the touchpad detection / setting setup Pd has a set of 
inclued midi sending obejects which are really easy to use to send CC, 
notes etc.

> 
> The idea would be to send CCs to a sequencer or soft synth, but being able to
> send it to an external hardware device would also be very useful.
> 

MIDI objects receive/send alsa-midi so you can route them to any 
sequencer, synth or hardware device which can receive alsa-midi.

Hope this helps.

Lorenzo.

[0] https://puredata.info/
[1] There is also a Pd 'distribution' which comes packed with many many 
externals out of the box, Purr Data: https://www.purrdata.net/