African Music Machine

by Otto Henry

AFRICAN MUSIC MACHINE allows you to program and play a colorful African drum and idiophone ensemble. Learn about African traditional music as you select and cross different rhythms and instruments.

Start and stop playing by hitting the space bar. There are various settings for the different instruments - like tempo, beat and patterns - and they are explained in detail in the Readme documentation. Go over it to understand what you are doing, or simply experiment with the settings and press the space bar to hear the result. The names of the instruments flash as they play.

The idiophones - clap, cowbell, casaba (shaker) and agogo (metal leaf) - all have a test button. Press it to hear their sound. The Sansa (also called a kalimba or likembe) is made from flattened nails or saw blades and played with the thumbs. Click to turn it on or off. Do the same for the xylophone (marimba).

There are 4 drums - conga, hi drum, foot drum and lo drum. Click the colored buttons to sound each instrument, and experiment with their settings as for the idiophones.

Save your best ensemble settings to memory and recall them, using the Program memory settings. If you want the Machine to play continuously in a random fashon, click 'constant random play' and get a sampling of different ensemble sounds. This is an interesting way to make a recording for background music.

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