Introduction

Repeating a melody

Okay, so you wrote a nice melody. What if you want to repeat it, or parts of it, a few times. You could copy and paste the melody but that gets a bit tiring after a while. Luckily you can use repetition! The fancy computer science term for this is iteration which just means doing things more than once.

Write 2.times do to the beginning of your melody and end to the end of your melody (the notes are in musical notation just for example, you can use MIDI notes if you wish):

2.times do
  play :c4
  sleep 0.5
  play :d4
  sleep 0.5
  play :e4
  sleep 0.5
  play :c4
  sleep 0.5
end

Instead of using 2.times do you can choose how many times you want to repeat the notes. For example 4.times do or 99.times do.

You can also use repetitions inside repetitions if you wish:

4.times do
  4.times do
    play :c4
    sleep 0.25
  end
  play :d4
  sleep 0.5
  play :f4
  sleep 0.5
end