Toy Synthesizer

Toy musical synthesizer for Linux that generates audio notes using your computer keyboard.

The lower keys on the computer keyboard z to m are mapped to synthesized musical tones A to G.

|-------------KEYS: ----------------| 
|       			    |
|   [z][x][c][v][b][n][m]           |
|                                   |
|------- MUSICAL TONES -------------|
|                                   |
|   [A][B][C][D][E][F][G]           |         
|___________________________________|

Once compiled you run the toy synthesizer from the terminal using the command below.

./toysynth

You can cut-out and make a piano-keys template using the diagrams at Piano-Keyboard-Guide to fit on top of the computer keyboard.

Test the synthesizer by tapping out a tune such as Twinkle Twinkle Litte Star which has the musical note sequence shown below.

CC GG AA G
FF EE DD C
GG FF EE D
CC GG AA G
FF EE DD C

Press the "Q-Key" to quit.

Build From Source

The C source code for the Toy Synthesizer application is provided in the src directory.

You need to install the GCC GNU Compiler Collection. With both Debian Bookworm and Ubuntu you this by installing the build-essential package using the terminal command as shown below.

sudo apt install build-essential

The ALSA utils package is also required but should be installed by default. If not use the command below.

sudo apt install alsa-utils

Use the MAKEFILE to compile as shown below.

make

To run the Toy Synthesizer from the terminal use

./toysynth

To do

• tones for sharps
• different tone sounds

Versioning

SemVer is used for versioning. The version number has the form 0.0.0 representing major, minor and bug fix changes.

Author

• Alan Crispin Github

License

Toy Synthesizer is licensed under LGPL v2.1.

Project Status

Active.

Acknowledgements

• Geany can be used as a source code editor for opening, viewing and then compiling the Toy Synthesizer C code. Geany is lightweight and has an integrated terminal for building the application.