wavesynth

A simple sound-synthesis library that provides a simplified stateful API for generating music. The API is intentionally analogous to the turtle API to assist in the creation of music-based assignments that duplicate lessons from graphics-based assignments for more accessible course design.

The library has fairly unsophisticated synthesis resulting in pretty basic sounds, and is also not super performant, although both of these things could be improved.

A log of notes is printed to assist with debugging and/or for matching desired output.

Designed by Peter Mawhorter. Contributions from Lyn & Ohana Turbak.

Dependencies

Writing audio to .wav files can be accomplished using just the built-in Python modules, but if you want to play audio directly from Python, you'll need either pyglet or simpleaudio.

Installing

To install from PyPI, run the following command on the command-line:

python -m pip install wavesynth

Once it's installed, you can run a built-in example using:

python -m wavesynth

Documentation

See the documentation for more details on how to use it and what each function does.

Changelog

• Version 2.3.0 allows the use of pyglet instead of simpleaudio for playTrack support as well as adding an open-in-browser fallback.
• Version 2.2.0 adds support for playing audio directly via IPython when running in a Jupyter notebook, without needing to use simpleaudio. This also creates an audio widget in the page via which the sound can be replayed without re-running the code if desired.
• Version 2.1.0 changes volume handling so that louder can cause volume values to go above 1.0, but internally loudness does not increase beyond 1.0. This means that symmetric calls to louder and then quieter will always cancel each other out, even if the louder calls would take the volume above 1.0.
• Version 2.0.0 replaces stepUp and stepDown with climbUp and climbDown and removes leapUp and leapDown. New functions like setFundamental and setScaleType manage an internal notion of key signature which controls how climbUp and climbDown change pitches. To emulate the old leap functionality, set the scale type to a pentatonic scale and use the climb functions.