Telepad

Built for Music Hack Day London 2013.

Use a Novation Launchpad and the Twilio API to play looped sounds on up to eight phones.

How?

You'll need a Twilio account, an ngrok account, a list of up to eight sound files hosted somewhere and a list of up to eight phone numbers.

Run ngrok:

$ ngrok 9999

You need a JSON config file as follows. The ngrok address needs to match the assigned one from above.

{
  "midi": {
    "port": 0
  },
  "ngrok": {
    "address": "http://abcabc.ngrok.com",
    "port": 9999
  },
  "twilio": {
    "sid": "abcabc",
    "token": "defdef",
    "number": "[phone]"
  },
  "sounds": [
    "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/telepad/mp3-128-cropped/Glockenspiel+A1.mp3",
    "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/telepad/mp3-128-cropped/Glockenspiel+B1.mp3",
    "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/telepad/mp3-128-cropped/Glockenspiel+D1.mp3",
    "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/telepad/mp3-128-cropped/Glockenspiel+D2.mp3",
    "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/telepad/mp3-128-cropped/Glockenspiel+E1.mp3",
    "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/telepad/mp3-128-cropped/Glockenspiel+E2.mp3",
    "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/telepad/mp3-128-cropped/Glockenspiel+F%231.mp3",
    "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/telepad/mp3-128-cropped/Glockenspiel+F%232.mp3"
  ],
  "numbers": [
    "[phone]",
    "[phone]",
    "[phone]",
    "[phone]",
    "[phone]",
    "[phone]",
    "[phone]",
    "[phone]"
  ]
}

Then start the Telepad server:

$ telepad

The config file is expected to be named config.json and located in the current working directory. If it's not, you can pass in a relative path.

$ telepad some/other/file.json

The special buttons on the right of the Launchpad will light up red for each phone number in your config. Press them to make a call, you'll see them turn green. Each row corresponds to a phone and each button corresponds to a sound from your config!

With thanks to Syd Lawrence for midi-launchpad and his helpful advice.