Make a patch that loads eight copies of an abstraction which simply plays a note, using a sinusoidal oscillator with a "line~" amplitude control. At the simplest, you can just specify the pitch of the note as an argument to the abstraction; i.e., call it "voice.pd" and invoke it as "voice 440", etc. Then use "osc~ $1" inside the "voice" abstraction to get the pitch. This way you'll end up with 8 different pitches.

Give the abstraction an inlet which, when you "bang" it, triggers the "line~" to go up to 1 and then down to 0. For example, you could make the rise time 10 milliseconds, and the decay time 1 second. Note that you'll have to start the decay AFTER A DELAY OF 10 MSEC, or else it will cancel the attack.

You can give the abstraction a signal outlet (the "outlet~" object) and just add all the outputs up. Somewhat better style might be to make a "summing bus", as is done in the online documentation examples.

Now, using a metronome, a counter, and a "select" object, arrange for the eight copies to get a "bang" in round-robin fashion.

There should be separate controls to set:

• the number of "notes" per second; that is, how fast the metronome should run. You will want to divide 60,000 by this number to learn the time in milliseconds to feed the "metro" object.
• the attack time. This should control both the rise time of the amplitude envelope (the line~ object) in the "voice" abstraction, and also, the delay until the decay portion is sent. You'll need to use a "float" object to store this value, and send the message to the line~.
• the decay time. This should control decay time of the amplitude envelope.

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