bobacus/soundgen

Overview

SoundGen is a simple synthesiser and sequencer written in Java. It allows you to write music in a subset of Common Lisp.

To compile it, you need Java (JDK 1.8 or later) and Maven.

e.g. try this command:

mvn test exec:java -Dexec.mainClass=net.bobacus.soundgen.SoundGen -Dexec.args=tunes/tune1.txt

This will compile, run any unit tests, and if successful, will execute the main SoundGen program, passing in tunes/tune1.txt to play.

It's essentially undocumented, but the basic idea is that the final s-expression in the tune file should return a list of channels, each of which is a list of sounds. Each sound is a triple (instrument, pitch, duration). The channels are played in parallel. See Music.java for the actual detail.

Instruments are defined in Instruments.java, with the mInstruments array implying the instrument numbers used in the Lisp output structure.

History

• 2006: Initial Java 5 version, using Jatha 2.7.1
• 2017: Project resurrected, put onto github. Refactoring to Java 8.

Licence and Copyright

SoundGen is copyright Robert Adamson.

SoundGen incorporates and uses the Jatha library, copyright (C) 1997-2003 Micheal Scott Hewett, Palo Alto, CA. The distribution and use of Jatha is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser GPL v2.1