[melbourne-pug] Meeting Tomorrow

[Anthony Briggs]

Tennessee Leeuwenburg wrote:
> If you want something interesting that will attract me to future events, 
> I've got a problem I can't solve. I want to do lots of stuff with sound, 
> right from first principles, but can't work out the right libraries to 
> let me do it.

> ... I thought that one might be able to expand the idea to create a 
> naturalistic environment noise, whose elements are in fact tracking 
> various metrics. You might indicate changes in a stock price with the 
> sounds of a bird call, signal each hour with a falling tree, overlay a 
> kind of slow-repeat semi-random layer of pleasant sounds such as moving 
> water, wind in the trees, rain, etc etc.

Sounds here like you want to reimplement Boodler/PyMedia/etc. Boodler's
the one that does tracking of real time events, anyway. It's a thought
that I've had myself, since I seem to recall that Boodler only plays
wacky Sun-formatted mu-law files.

No idea about PyMedia, it seems like more of a media player idea, rather
than triggering stuff.

> I tried to get something up and running, but after a day and a half I'm 
> feeling a bit dispirited. I have found countless tools to let me trigger 
> a pre-existing sound file, but almost nothing relevant to creating 
> sounds from scratch.

But it sounds here like you want Audacity, or a similar sound editor.
Right tool for the job, and all that. I doubt that there's any easy way
to make the sound of a tree falling by tweaking waveforms.

If you really want to generate sound samples programmatically, I did a
quick Google search:

<http://www.google.com.au/search?q=python+program+create+sound>

which turns up <http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonInMusic>. That
probably has something that does what you want :)

> I got to the point where I could generate a samples array using Numeric, 
> but I couldn't work out how to turn that into sound output.

<http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2001/01/31/numerically.html> looks
interesting - it seems to go the other way, ie. from a sound file,
generate a waveform, but you might be able to turn it on it's head...

Does that help? Am I close?

Anthony

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