din is a free software musical instrument for performing Indian classical music (but not just) live. It is inspired by the sound of the Sarangi, an Indian bowed string instrument and the user interface of the Theremin. But din is constructed like the Piano. It displays a keyboard that has a large number of thin, closely spaced keys. The 12 notes of the octave are among them and the range of the instrument is 3 octaves. But unlike a piano, you can have as many keys as you want between any two notes. These inbetween tones (notes?) are called microtones and are very important for rendering Indian classical music.

Playing din is a bit like playing the piano. You strike a key on the piano with your finger. Here you position your mouse on a key. If you strike a piano key hard, the note is loud and if you strike it soft, the note is quiet. In din, your mouse position on the key determines how loud the note is. If you are at the bottom, the note is quiet. If you are at the top, the note is loud. But unlike a piano, you can continously vary the volume of the note by moving up and down the din keyboard. This is similar to varying the volume of a note by varying the bow pressure on the violin. And you can sustain a note for as long as you want too. Just keep your mouse on the key! Want vibrato? Want tremolo? Sway around the key!

However, din has a limitation. Because there is only 1 mouse, we can point to only 1 key at a time and hence din can play only 1 note (or tone) at a time. Consequently, we cant perform a lot of Western classical music as we cant play chords. But Indian classical music only seeks the aesthetic relationship of the current note to the previous note and the relationship of all notes to the tonic called Sa. In other words, Indian classical music requires us to play one note after another! But not just one note after another either - how we move from one note to another, how long we stay at a note, how loud is our stay and the state we leave a note in matters too. With support for microtones and the ability to play notes soft or loud, we can perform this on din just like we can on any traditional instrument used today for performing Indian classical Music (eg., Sarod, Sitar or the Sarangi).

So how does din sound? It doesn't sound like the piano. It sounds more like a bowed instrument because we use the mouse like a bow and can sustain a note for as long as we want. The ubiquitous mouse is an inexpensive but highly accurate input device. As we move across the keyboard, it continuously provides the notes we visited which din continuously transforms into sound.

To hear: Sound Samples.

To see: Screenshots.

To play:

din runs on the GNU/Linux operating system.

To run din, you need to get the source code and compile it. Download the source code with this command:

svn co http://din.googlecode.com/svn/trunk din

svn is the main command of the Subversion version control system which must be installed for the command(s) to work.

The README file contains instructions on how to compile and run din.

Once din is running, press F1 for detailed help.

Requirements: GNU/Linux, OpenGL drivers, SDL & Portaudio.

Project status: Work in Progress, not yet ready for general release, many features are hardwired, raga playable is Malkauns.