Arduino - Tone without delay - asynchronous

Question

I'm trying to play a tone while changing something on an LCD display. I've searched around and tried protothreads, but it seems that the delay still blocks the program. I've also tried removing the delay altogether, but it skipped everything except the last note. Is there a way to play a tone without using delay? (millis perhaps?)
Sample tone sequence:
//Beats per Minute
#define BPM 250
//Constants, try not to touch, touch anyways.
#define Q 60000/BPM //Quarter note
#define W 4*Q //Whole note
#define H 2*Q //Half note
#define E Q/2 //Eigth note
#define S Q/4 //Sixteenth note
void toneFunction()
{
tone(tonePin,C5,Q);
delay(1+W);
tone(tonePin,C5,Q);
delay(1+W);
tone(tonePin,C5,Q);
delay(1+W);
tone(tonePin,C6,W);
}

Answer 1

You can set up a timer and put note changing logic into an interrupt service routine (ISR).
Each X milliseconds, the timer will reset and interrupt your main loop. The ISR will run and pick the next note and call the tone function. After exiting the ISR, the program continues from the point it was interrupted.
I have attached a code I used in one of my projects. The timer will interrupt the main loop every 50ms (20 Hz), therfore you will have to put your own numbers in OCR1A and the pre-scaler. Please read more about timer interrupt in arduino so that you will understand how to do it (for example here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Timer-Interrupts/step2/Structuring-Timer-Interrupts/). You can also see the example at the end of this page (http://playground.arduino.cc/Code/Timer1) for a more user friendly way of doing this.
setup() {
....
/* Set timer1 interrupt to 20Hz */
cli();//stop interrupts
TCCR1A = 0;// set entire TCCR1A register to 0
TCCR1B = 0;// same for TCCR1B
TCNT1 = 0;//initialize counter value to 0
OCR1A = 781; // approximately 20Hz
TCCR1B |= (1 << WGM12);// turn on CTC mode
TCCR1B |= (1 << CS12) | (1 << CS10); // 1024 presxaler
TIMSK1 |= (1 << OCIE1A); // enable timer compare interrupt
sei();//allow interrupts
}
...
ISR(TIMER1_COMPA_vect){
// pick next note
}