Arpeggiation

Music has vertical harmonic structures and horizontal moving lines. Scales are horizontal patterns of single semitone and 2 semitone intervals. Arpeggiations are sequences of chord notes found in all types of music.

A two octave arpeggio in C major is C,E,G,C,E,G,C going up and down.

A harp piece often consists of arpeggiated chords, often played in dense rising and falling note sequences. Students  learning to play  musical instruments are required to practice scales and arpeggios to master scale patterns and to develop performance agility. 

EMU Proteus Arpeggiators

Professional electronic keyboards and sequencing software often include arpeggiators that allow composers and players to generate arpeggiations with little effort. The EMU Proteus 2500 includes sophisticated programming options that allows a player to trigger complex, multi-track sequenced data from a keyboard.

The EMU arpeggiations include up, down, up/down, forward assign, backward assign forward/backward and random patterns. You can also create unique patterns to control pitch sequences. You determine the tempo by choosing note values from a whole note to a 32nd note.  Additional variables are count and extension  that control how often the arpeggio  plays with a key press with the option of  transposing the repeating sequences. A recycle parameter resets the sequence to the beginning when the duration value has been reached. A latch function turns on and maintains the arpeggiation until another key is pressed. The note range can be set to a user-defined section of the keyboard.