garykl / gound

sound generation on the command line

Gound

Gound is a tiny framework that allows me to quickly create sounds without having to worry about technicaal details so much. The purpose is to create executables that can be interacted with in the simplest possible way that I can think of, which is standard input.

The general idea is to create parameterized sounds. By providing a small number of parameters an existing sound can be modified. Continuously modifying a synthesizer allows all kinds of possibilities, such as sequencing or more experimental ways of producing something.

create a sound executable

Create a class of instance Tickable with a public member called modify, which is an instance of MultiModifiable. Then a call to showOff with that instance as single argument. That’s it! You can find examples in the synth folder. Using make, all source files in the synth folder are being compiled and the resulting executables are saved in the same folder.

When the executable is executed, it starts playing sound. The executable waits for standard input, which is of the form of whitespace seperated numbers. All the number are floating point numbers between zero and one. What those numbers actually mean is free to the programmer (it might be useful to think about conventions, such that programs using such synths know what to expect).

interact with synthesizers

The folder parameterizers contains several python scripts that can be used, some of which interactively, to produce standard output, that can be fed into the synthesizer executables by piping.

Another reason for me to create this little framework was to sonificate simulation results from a theoretical description of a swimming micro organism.