real time FM synthesizer

[Irmen de Jong]

It seems that Python is fast enough [1] to create a real time FM music synthesizer
(think Yamaha DX-7). I made one that you can see here:
  https://github.com/irmen/synthesizer

The synthesizer can create various waveforms (sine, sawtooth, pulse etc.) and lets you
modify them in various ways. You can apply FM (frequency modulation), PWM (pulse-width
modulation), volume envelopes, vibrato, and reverb/echo. It is primarily based around
oscillators that are represented as generator functions in the code.
A GUI is provided that gives access to most of the features interactively, and lets you
play a tune with your created FM instrument on a piano keyboard.

You will need Python 3.x and pyaudio to be able to hear sound, and matplotlib if you
want to see graphical diagrams of generated waveforms.

I can't create nice music myself but this was a fun project to build and to learn how FM
synthesizers work internally :)



Irmen


[1]: meaning it can generate and play fairly complex waveforms based on multiple
oscillators and filters in real time in one 44.1 kHz audio channel. That is on a 3.2 ghz
machine.  With enough oscillator/filters combined however it starts to stutter and
cannot do it anymore in real time. However you can still generate those waveforms and
save them to a .wav on disk to play afterwards.  The code only uses one CPU core though
so maybe there's room for improvement.