I chose the programming track for this assignment, so I made a new soundfont using Swami and sequenced a simple tune, using samples recorded with a home-brew microphone.
The largest challenge of this was building the microphone and getting my sample recorded. The result of my work can be heard in the original recording, here. The theme is Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, being played on a trombone mouthpiece, and recorded using the microphone built for this assignment.
Then following the directions provided, I went through the process of breaking my recording up into samples, creating a soundfont, and creating a MIDI file with the Twinkle theme. Combining all of these together, I came out with my final product, the sampled version of Twinkle. Here is the Lilypond output of the MIDI file created in Rosegarden:
The sampled version is significantly more in tune than my original attempt, due largely to the difficulties of playing the "instrument" at hand and my relative inexperience playing a trombone mouthpiece by itself. The velocity calculations that the soundfont creator makes get the pitches much closer to their actual relations than does my novice playing. As the sampled version goes to higher notes, the durations of the notes get shorter, something that could probably be fixed by starting with a longer sample. Other than that, the sampled version sounds surprisingly good, considering it is just pitch correcting a single quarter note played on the mouthpiece.
Trombone mouthpiece image taken from http://www.yamaha.co.jp/edu/english/soho/tb/tb_001.html