This paper explains the process and the result of developing a device to compose musical pieces that is both portable and intuitive to use. The project focuses on the use of a PIC microcontroller for a wide variety of functions such as generating musical notes, controlling a graphical LCD, a touchpad, saving and loading data with a non-volatile EEPROM memory and communicating the device with a PC through the serial port. This report also contains the design for the circuit that houses the PIC and additional electronic components, and an explanation of the computer program we made that receives the data from the device and translates it to the appropriate format used with open-source software Lilypond.

This thesis intends to create a helpful tool for every kind of musician and be an interesting and fun project that inspires other engineers to build their own devices.