mtalk

JC and I have added mtalk to our sf2a — solfege to audio — distribution. Once installed, you can do this:

% mtalk 'Please get me a quart of milk at \
   the store.  Thanks.' -p -t tempo:144

The option -p means “play the audio file immediately,” and -t temp:144 sets the temp. Here is what the result sounds like:

Please get me a quart of milk at the store. Thanks.

This little programming project (we have to get our fun somehow:-) was inspired by James Gleick’s book, The Information. See previous post

HH.

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sf2a – the new sf2sound

Many changes. (1) New name –sf2a (2) source code is at github. (3) At github click on download button if you wish to download. (4) Installation on mac: untar or unzip downoaded file, cd to the resulting folder, run sudo sh setup.sh -install YOUR_USER_NAME; (5) after install, run sf2a 'do re mi' A file out.wav should be created. This is the audio file. (6) There is a musical dictation program, dict that creates audio files and a web page for dictation exercises based on the data in a text file. Use the file dictation.txt in the install folder for an example. Just run dict -m in that folder, then open the web page index.html. (7) For a draft manual, see this web page.

All this works on a mac. Adapting it to Linux is easy. Just change the values of $INSTALL_DIR and $BIN_DIR in setup.sh. I don’t know enough about PC’s to advise on this — one ought to be able to modify the file setup.sh

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Audio Programming 6: Sonatina

Improvements — more shapely waveforms produced by quad2samp eliminates those durn popping sounds — and much more! Source code for quad2samp and sf2sound.py

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |Source Code

Many changes, including new names for the commands. Here is an example:

% sf2sound test '|| fundamental:261 f: tempo:120 | stacc: q do re mi fa | leg: p: h sol sol ||'

And here is the audio:

test.wav

The dynamics f: and p:, for forte and piano, now work thanks to the improved back-end program quad. I have renamed it quad2samp. The command fundamental:261 sets the frequency in Hertz of do. For longer examples, you can take a file as input:

sf2sound -f theme.solfa

The file theme.solfa represents the first 15 measures of a sonatina in C by Muzio Clementi (Op. 36 No. 1). See the code pages. Here is the sound file:

theme.wav

previous version

Notice that those terrible popping sounds are gone. Eliminating them turned out to be a problem in waveform shaping, which is accomplished in quad2samp using some nice little quadratic functions. I will discuss these improvements and others in the next few posts, as well as give all the source code.

One of the major changes is a clearer idea of what the input language is and can do. I am dubbing the language SF — for solfa, of course. It has three basic entities: note symbols, rhythm symbols, and commands. The symbols can be accented. Thus do+ is an accented do which is interpreted as C#, while do^ is one of two ways to write C an octave above the given C, the other being do2. An important accent for a rhythm symbol is the dot. Just as in music, it increases the value by one-half. Thus q. is a dotted quarter note.

Commands may or may not take arguments. Thus we have tempo:144 but also allegro:. Some commands take more than one argument. An example is cresc:4:f, which means crescendo over four beats to forte. One can also say cresc:4, which means crescendo over four beats from the current level to whatever level results. The rapidity of the crescendo is a default constant which of course can be adjusted: crescendo-speed:1.2. The commands change the values of the “SF” machine that transforms a stream of tokens in the SF language into quadruples. So far this architecture seems to remarkably easy to extend and maintain.

This little project is more work than I bargained for, but it beats playing video games. I am having fun and learning a lot. The Audio Programming Book by Boualanger and Lazzarini is a fantastic resource.

HH

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Audio Programming 5: quad to wav

A better way of creating .wav files given note data

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |Source Code

Today’s post in my little saga of learning audio programming features a program quad.c. It creates a .wav file given a file of quadruples of the form (frequency in Hertz, duration in seconds, decay factor, amplitude). There are advantages of this approach as compared to to the previous one, which was based on concatenating the text files produced by tfork.  First, only a single intermediate text file containing waveform sample data is created.  In the first version,  one file was created for each note, plus one for the concatenation of all the former.  The concatenated file can be quite large. It is a file of 44,100 numbers for each second of audio which represents the sampled waveform. With quad, the file size is of corse the same as that of the concatenated file. The waveform which is sampled, however, has continuously varying phase. With the concatenated files produced by tfork, the phase begins at zero at the start of each note.  More importantly, in the new version, the volume of the individual notes can be controlled by setting the amplitude in foo.quad. You will notice the increase in volume in note to note when you play the file foo.wav.

In the next post, quad will be incorporated in solfa2sf.

Example. Here is a three-line file of quadruples that represents the notes A E A’, where A’ is an octave above A = 220 Hertz:


File: foo.quad
220 1.0 0.5 0.2
330 1.0 0.5 0.5
440 1.0 0.5 1.0


The comments in quad.c give more details, but suffice to say here running the following plays the sound represented by foo.quad


./quad foo.quad foo.samp
text2sf foo.samp foo.wav 44100 1 .90
rm foo.samp
play foo.wav


FOO.WAV

Note the increase in volume from note to note.

HH

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Audio Programming 4: Improvements to solfa2sf

In version two of solfa2sf: we can enter rhythm as well as pitch values, and we can control tempo and note decay

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Source Code

Source Code for solfa2sf

The first version of solfa2sf took a string of solfa syllables and produced a .wav sound file representing it. This was good as a start, but we want to do more! In particular, we would like to be able to give different rhythm values to the notes. I’ve posted an improved version of solfa2sf that does just this. One can use the program on the command line like this

solfa2sf foo '| q do2 . e mi2 do2 . q sol sol |'


The result is a file foo.wav:

foo

It represents a melody that starts with a quarter note C above middle C, continues with a pair of eighth notes, and ends with a pair of quarter notes.

To work with longer bits of music, it is best to write the solfa in a text editor, then compute the sound file like this.

solfa2sf -f theme.solfa


The file (theme.solfa) is this text below


tempo:120
decay:0.3
| q do2 . e mi2 do2 . q sol sol |
| do2 . e mi2 do2 . q sol sol2 |
| e fa2 mi2 re2 do2 . ti do2 ti do2 |
| re2 do2 ti la . q sol x |


The symbols || . | have no effect on the program and could be omitted. They do help the human who reads or composes tis text, however. The possible rhythm values at this moment are w (whole note), h (half note) q (quarter note), e (eighth note), and s (sixteenth note). The command tempo:120 sets the tempo, and decay:0.1 determines how fast a note trails off into silence: Increase it to make the sound more sustained, decrease it to make it more percussive.

Below is the sound file. Click the link to play it. Do you recognize the piece? I studied it as a child back in Iceland.

theme.wav

HH

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Audio Programming 3: From Solfa to Sound

We combine C and Python programming to transform a sequence of solfege syllables, e.g., do re mi re do, into a sound file.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Source Code

In our last post we used tfork and a few unix commands to construct a sound file for an A major chord, A C# E A’. The idea was (1) to make text files representing the sounds of the individual notes using tfork, (2) glue the text files end-to-end using cat, (3) convert the resulting big text file into a .wav file using text2sf.

This works fine for short “melodies,” but it soon gets tedious — and out of hand. A better way is to write a short program that does all this for you, given a text string of solfa syllables like “do re mi re do”. This is what we do in the Python program solfa2sf. Below is the sound produced by


./solfa2sf -w foo 0.3 0.1 do re mi re do


SOUND OF FOO

SOURCE CODE for solfa2sf

In running solfa2sf, the arguments are as follows: (1) an option: -d for “dry run”, i.e., no output, -v for an output file with verbose messages, -w for wet, the opposite of dry: produces the output .wav file with few messages; (2) the file name; foo results in an output file foo.wav, (3) the note duration in seconds, (4) the decay time, (*) the solfa syllables.

If you use a small decay time, the sound is percussive, like a marimba, or even a drum. If you use a large one, it is more like an organ. Try delay times of 0.01, 0.1, and 1.0 to see what the effect is.

Python is very good with strings, lists, and dictionaries, which is what we need to parse and handle an input string like “do re mi re do’. C is the best tool for fast computation. So we use them together! As you can see from the source code, we call on the C program tfork using the Python command os.system. Like a carpenter, we use saw, chisel, hammer, etc. as needed for the task at hand.

HH

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Audio Programming 2: Constructing a Chord

We combine the power of tfork and text2sf with the magic of unix to construct a sound file for an A major chord.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Source Code

A Chord

In Audio Programming 1, we compiled the tfork.c program in chapter 1 of the Audio Programming Book, Richard Boulanger and Victor Lazzarini, editors. This program , together with text2sf, gave us the tools needed to algorithmically construct simple sounds, namely an exponentially decaying sine wave. We used these tools to fabricate a file that represents the sound of a tuning fork.

Simple as these two tools are, they gives us the means to construct more complicated sounds without any additional C programming (fun though that is!). We will use the magic of unix. To begin, a short shell script:


# Language: unix/sh
# File: sound.sh
# Example: sh sound.sh 440 a --- writes text representation of
# a 0.2 second 220 Herz sound to a file a.txt

./tfork $2.txt 0.2 $1 44100 0.2


Using sound.sh, we make four sounds, each 0.2 seconds in duration, with frequencies of 220, 275, 330, and 440 Hertz. These correspond to the notes A, C#, E, and A’ = A one octave higher. The frequency ratios are C#/A = 5/4, E/A = 3/2, and A’/A = 2. Thus we are using Pythagorean tuning, in which pitch ratios in the scale are rational numbers with small numerator and denominator.

Let us now execute the following commands:


% sh sound.sh 220 a
% sh sound.sh 275 c#
% sh sound.sh 330 e
% sh sounds.sh 440 a2


The result is the creation of text files a.txt, c#.txt, etc., which represent the given sounds. Next, we concatenate these files, putting a.txt first, c#.txt next, etc:


% cat a.txt c#.txt e.txt a2.txt >chord.txt


Then, we convert chord.txt into a .wav file:


% text2sf chord.txt chord.wav 44100 1 1.0


To conclude, we play the file:


play chord.wav


Here is the sound:

A MAJOR CHORD

Clearly there is more to do, among which are  (1) Clean up this sound: it needs to fade cleanly into silence; (2) Develop a mini language for transforming a sequence of pitch names into a sound file; (3) make more complex sounds.

HH

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Audio Programming 1: Our First Sound

A 440

We will use the magic of unix to make a tuning fork

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Source Code

Things are a little slow at the shop these days – the aftermath of getting our big software development project done. With some time to spare, I’ve been reading The Audio Programming Book, edited by Richard Boulanger and Victor Lazzarini. As a substiture for note-taking as I work my way through this excellent text, I’ve to decided to blog about it.

The first task, from Chapter 1, around page 162, is to write a playable file for the sound of a tuning fork. The end result sounds like what you will hear if you click this link:

OUR FIRST SOUND

Wasn’t that nice? You did play it didn’t you? Here is how we did it – proceed only if you speak C and enjoy the power and elegance of Unix:

Step 1. Compile the program tfork.c using gcc tfork.c -o tfork. You will find it on the CD in chapters/01..., or here. Then execute this command:

./tfork tfork.txt 1.0 440.0 44100 0.2

The result is a 44,000 line text file, tfork.txt, whose first three lines are as follows:


0.00000000
0.06277625
0.12529051


It looks like this:

Tuning fork sound: A 440, exponential decay.

The file represents a sine wave at 440 Herz that decays exponentially to a small fraction of the starting amplitude after 1.0 seconds. The sample rate for the sound is 44100 Herz. The tfork command is used this way:

./tfork outfile duration frequency sample_rate decay_constant

Step 2. Compile the code in text2sf.c and install the binary somewhere in your search path. Execute the command

text2sf tfork.txt tfork.wav 44100 1 1.0

You now have a one-second CD-quality “recording” of a tuning fork! It is in the file tfork.wav You can play it using whatever means suits you and your computer best. On a mac, the command

play tfork.wav

works fine.

Isn’t it interesting that a sound can be represented so many different ways? As a list of numbers, that is, a text file. As an image. As the digital sound file that the computer can directly play. As vibrations in the air that tickle the hair cells in our inner ear. As a memory …

There must be some deep philosophical meaning in all this.

HH

PS. Related links: Barry Threw: Art and Technology

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