Suggestions for playing music from real-time data generated in Julia

Specific Domains Signal and Image Processing
1

A little project I have in mind requires making data in real time (well, maybe 100 times a second at most) that is used to output music in real time. Details are scant because I haven’t really done anything yet, I’m trying to see what my options are and would love suggestions from the more experienced. So far I envision two vague approaches:

  1. Computing a MIDI stream that an existing software synthesizer can use to make music. I like the idea of this because of functionality (especially audio effects like reverb) I honestly have no idea how to implement from scratch. However, I haven’t been able to find any way to stream MIDI from a Julia script to a software synthesizer. JuliaMusic has some options for playing MIDI files, but I don’t know if that’s at all applicable for MIDI data I’m making on the fly.
    I found pyfluidsynth, a Python binding for FluidSynth, and it made me wonder if I need a Julia binding for a synthesizer to do this with Julia.

  2. Computing a waveform from periodic pitch and volume data, and streaming samples of it regularly. I pulled this off with PyAudio’s callback mode a few years ago. I’m not stoked about this option because, again, I would rather use existing software instead of reinventing the wheel. Still, if I must, I need a way to play WAV-like audio data. So far I’ve found PortAudio.jl (but Pkg.add isn’t working for it, not sure why). If the 1st approach is unfeasible, I’m open to suggestions for this one.

2

It looks like

https://github.com/JuliaMusic/MIDI.jl

has all the building blocks to emit a stream of MIDI chunks — I would suggest asking how to connect to a midi server in an issue.

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3

I’m unsure about how to ask this because I don’t know what a MIDI server is. I do see an open issue that seems related: #8 Allow midi events to be written directly to a midi device.

4

It’s a sink that can receive MIDI events and convert them to an audio signal. You may be able to use a network connection via RTP-MIDI too, but I am not familiar with the details (all my MIDI knowledge comes from having musician friends who ask me for computer setup help occasionally, which I provide along these lines).

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5

I don’t see this package in the general registry, so it likely hasn’t been registered. You can use Pkg to just add the GitHub repo directly though ] add https://github.com/JuliaAudio/PortAudio.jl