Sound programming: Tone production in Python?

[sj]

Joseph Blaylock wrote:

> 
> I've been searching around the 'net for information on sound programming
> in Python, particularly tutorials, etc., but the outlook appears to be
> pretty
> bleak.  There's a lot of stuff about playing back previously-sampled audio
> files, but I haven't found anything about making music or (especially)
> generating raw tones.
> 
> For example, if I wanted to generate a tone of 200 hertz and a tone of 205
> hertz on audio channels 0 and 1, respectively, for a duration of two
> seconds,
> how might I accomplish this?  Pygame's sndarray module looks promising,
> but seems a bit light on it's documentation, especially of a tutorial
> nature.
> 
> So: can anybody tell me a sure-fire way to generate tones from Python? 
> Bonus points for sticking to packages that are in Debian unstable, or part
> of the
> basic distribution.  And further, can anybody provide me pointers to more
> generalized sound/music programming resources for Python, especially of a
> tutorial nature?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
>     Joe

Although this doesn't answer your question re python you might be interested 
in these other synthesis packages.

1. Nyquist is an extension of XLisp with very power synthesis/composition 
functions.  It is featured in the Fall 1997 issue (Vol 20, No 3) of the 
Computer Music Journal  
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Computer-Music-Journal/

You can find binaries and sources at 
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/music/web/music.software.html

2. "Common Lisp Music" is another very powerful synthesis language based on 
lisp.  I have not used it myself and don't have the URL offhand but it 
should be easy to find.


Steven Jones