Sound generation recommendations?

[Charles Hixson]

I'm looking for a simple means of generatings sounds. Basically what I
want to do is play music from the information available in sheet music.
I would like to send the commands to the player in relatively short
bursts (the initial application is desired
to be a rising diatonic scale everytime the ball bounces off a paddle in
a game of pong, based on tomspong.py (an SDL application). I think that
the beep function in the winsound module would work, but I want this to
work on Linux and the Mac, and I don't even have a Windows box to test
it on.

It would be nice if I could also specify the "instrument", for some
definition of instrument. But this would be useful only if I had access
to a library of instruments. Stereo might be a nice feature to add in
later, but not yet unless it were really easy. My feeling about this
part right now is "KISS, or you'll be diverted from the parts that are
more important.".

All the sound modules I've looked at seem to run off of sampled wave
forms ... and this is nearly the opposite of what I want.

 

[Simon Burton]

I'm looking for a simple means of generatings sounds. Basically what I
want to do is play music from the information available in sheet music. I [cut]
All the sound modules I've looked at seem to run off of sampled wave forms
... and this is nearly the opposite of what I want.

Hi Charles,
take a look at hypersonic:
http://arrowtheory.com/software/hypersonic/index.html

It's fairly rough around the edges, and the windows port
is not ready yet, but it might do what you want. The next big
release will be licensed LGPL if that helps.

Simon.

 

[Chris S]

The only reasonably reliable python sound toolkit I know of is Snack,
http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/. Unfortunately, it's mainly geared towards
tcl, is relatively light on documentation (especially on sound generation),
and the author seems to have lost interest in the project.

Pygame, http://www.pygame.org/, also has some sound generation capabilities,
although they're not its primary focus.

Chris S.