I briefly removed the timestamps from my program, but I didn’t notice any change in performance any more, so I just left them in the program as before. I also made my program a little more interesting by playing random notes instead of looping through a sequence of notes, and changed the beat counter to increment every eighth note instead of every quarter note. The latter change will be important when I finally replace PortAudio with FluidSynth.

I also played around with the VMPK and Qsynth programs in Linux to refresh myself on how MIDI playback works and how I can send MIDI messages from my program to one of these programs. Thanks to that, I now have a better idea of what I need to do with FluidSynth to make Kinect to MIDI playback happen. I also plan to have a CSV file that stores the following values for the music we want to play:

beatNumber, channelNumber, noteNumber, noteOn/Off

The instruments that correspond to each channel will have to be specified beforehand too.