Sound.jl Documentation

Contents

• Sound overview
• Phase Vocoder
• • Overview
• Sound.jl Documentation
• • Contents
  • Overview
  • Getting started
  • Example
  • PortAudio on Linux
  • Methods list
  • Methods usage

Overview

The Julia module Sound.jl exports the functions sound and soundsc for playing an audio signal through a computer audio output.

Their use is designed to be similar to Matlab commands sound and soundsc to facilitate code migration.

Getting started

using Pkg
Pkg.add("Sound")

Example

using Sound
S = 8192 # sampling rate in Hz
x = 0.6 * cos.(2π*(1:S÷2)*440/S)
y = 0.7 * sin.(2π*(1:S÷2)*660/S)
sound(x, S) # monophonic
sound([x y], S) # stereo
soundsc([x y], S) # scale to maximum volume

PortAudio on Linux

This package is layered on top of PortAudio. Some users have reported challenges on Linux OS in overcoming security access to the microphone, with errors like PortAudioException: Device unavailable. Here is an approach that worked for one user in 2024, using Julia 1.10.2.

• Install the alsa dev tools package. For a debian-based distro, use sudo apt install libasound-dev, which automatically changed the package to libasound2-dev instead.
• Download PortAudio directly (not the julia package) and extract the archive. I put the directory in my home folder but I’m not sure how much it matters.
• Follow the PortAudio linux build instructions up through sudo make install
• Run sudo ldconfig to allow access to other programs (such as julia).
• Caveat: This works inconsistently and requires frequent restarts of julia.