KeyListener and timing

Question

Hello,

I am writing program in Java will have to do with music input. I want to use my computer keyboard as instrument.Pretty much it will be as button accordion which I play. I will do the mapping between keys and notes through 2 octaves for beginning. I was thinking what would be good design in timing how much the key was pressed. I am using JFugue framework to generate music strings from what was played, and then it can be easily exported to midi. In order to generate these strings I will have to measure how much the tone was pressed and then give it some musical note length. This information about note length is also appended to the string. If you think I don't even need this please let me know, because I am Java beginner.

Answer 1

You can implement a KeyListener and rely on the the two keyPressed and keyReleased methods to time your notes.

Your KeyListener implementation would need to maintain state, perhaps in the form of a Map of VK_ codes -> event times. You could populate the Map with a start time in keyPressed processing, identifying the key in the KeyEvent through its getKeyCode(). You can then get the duration of the note once the keyReleased event fires by pulling the start time out of the Map with the key code.

If you haven't found it yet, here is Sun's tutorial on KeyListeners