faust VS Audio

Glicol looks very cool! Also check out Faust if you haven't (https://faust.grame.fr), another FP sound programming language.

The linked (https://github.com/grame-cncm/faust) looks reasonable to me.

Chata probably needs to work out roughly what the semantics of the language should be. Its good to know what the library support is intended to be as that informs language design (assuming the library is to be implemented in chata anyway). Quite a lot of this page is about syntax.

There are some design decisions that have deep impact on programming languages. Reflection, mutation, memory management, control flow, concurrency. There are some implementation choices that end up constraining the language spec - python seems full of these.

Echoing p4bl0, implementing the language will change the spec. Writing a spec up front might be an interesting exercise anyway. I'd encourage doing both at the same time - sometimes describe what a feature should be and then implement it, sometimes implement something as best you can and then describe what you've got.

Implementation language will affect how long it takes to get something working, how good the thing will be and what you'll think about along the way. The usual guidance is to write in something familiar to you, ideally with pattern matching as compilers do a lot of DAG transforms.

- I'd say that writing a language in C took me ages and forced me to really carefully think through the data representation.

- Writing one in lua took very little time but the implementation was shaky, probably because it let me handwave a lot of the details.

- Writing a language in itself, from a baseline of not really having anything working, makes for very confusing debugging and (eventually) a totally clear understanding of the language semantics.

Good luck with the project.

Faust integration would be awesome: https://faust.grame.fr Then again we have MaxMSP, so in the end it feels kind of redundant

Csound is extremely powerful, but my favorite thing in this vein these days is Faust:

https://faust.grame.fr/

It's a functional language with a nice way of generating diagrams of DSP algorithms, but its big killer feature for me is its language bindings, which include C, C++, Cmajor, Codebox, CSharp, DLang, Java, JAX, Julia, JSFX, "old" C++, Rust, VHDL, and WebAssembly (wast/wasm) out of the box.

Have a look at FAUST as well: https://faust.grame.fr/

Once you have an idea of basic programming practice, you need to learn some DSP programming. One of the better tools for this is Faust https://faust.grame.fr/ , bear in mind this is a functional programming language, and has very different syntax to C++, but the same principles apply.

Teensy which gives you a lot of options with its audio library and GUI tool.

Teensy is more powerful than Arduino, 4.X boards are in stock, 8 sets of serial ports, and has a supported audio library

Just in case you don't want to go from low level code and up this is the library development version (there is a release version that you install into the Arduino environment as well) and this is the GUI that makes it simpler to do the layout work for the modules of your device to make it more straight forward to do the build of the design work. You drag the modules from the left into the work area and then connect them up. Once you have the layout you want you then export the code for it into the Arduino IDE. In the right hand panel is the description of each module and what commands are used for it in the IDE.

If you are targetting microprocessors, you are probably best coding it from scratch so you can optimise. Teensy 4 seems to be the platform of choice for a lot of synth projects. The Teensy Audio Library might give you a bit of a head start. Dexed-micro touch is a great open project that can give you an idea of what is possible on Teensy and the dev is quite approachable.

You can overcome the RPi scarcity by migrating the code to the Teensy platform, which aside being cheaper and less power hungry than the 2,3,4 RPi, is a lot cheaper and more easily available. Not an easy task since there's no Linux under the hood, but there are some excellent audio/midi libraries to help. They already built commercial-level synthesizers with it. By combining the breath sensor data with other pressure sensors you could end up with a very expressive instrument.

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_MIDI.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2674LdYW5I

Personally, if I need to make custom software modules and design my own PCBs, I'm almost certainly not going to use something like LightShowPi as my starting code. I'd probably use a Teensy + Audio Shield + EL Sequencer and have the Teensy Audio Library do all the FFT/beat detection. It'd be much more power efficient, easier (IMHO) to build and maintain, and it still allows for expansion options for future add-ons. Funny thing is, I actually own an El Escudo Dos, but I have found it to be a giant PITA compared to simple edge-lit "Neon" LED strips or even the newer "nOOds" from Adafruit.

> Silly question but why is the Pi necessary?

Not sure about this project, but generally it is not. All it needs is a small board capable of running Linux and the necessary drivers for external ADCs/DACs where necessary, plus the digital fx software. As an example, Guitarix runs also on ARM and can work on cheaper boards such as the Orange PI, Nano PI and many others cheaper and more obtanium than the Raspberry PI. https://guitarix.org/

In some cases you don't even need to run Linux. There are many effects projects using a cheap Teensy board plus its piggybacked audio card; it features a really powerful audio library and is compatible with the Arduino IDE.

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html

The Teensy is truly amazing, to the point one can build synthesizers that just a few years ago would cost hundreds of bucks. Take a look for example at the TSynth, 100% Open Hardware & Open Source, also available in kit.

https://electrotechnique.cc/

Demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCA2L7CeWSE