The Musical Instrument Known as Perl

This month, Erin Schoenhals presented the first in her The Musical Instrument Known as Perl series.

The talk was extremely interesting and not the sort of thing we have done in the past. Erin's presentation was focused on the low-level details needed to parse a MIDI data stream and write a WAV file. She showed how to do bit-twiddling and byte-level manipulation in Perl. It's a side of Perl that many of us don't get to see in our normal work.

The last part of the presentation was particularly interesting as Erin started with a piece of non-functional, prototype code for writing WAV files. With the help of the attendees, debugged the code and produced audio files with different sounds. All in all, a very interesting meeting.

The turn-out was good at 11, with one of those attending remotely through DimDim. We'd like to thank cPanel, Inc. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.

The code from Erin's Bleepity project is available in her Mercurial repository.