soundgen readme

R package for sound synthesis and acoustic analysis.
Homepage with help, demos, etc: http://cogsci.se/soundgen.html
Source code on github: https://github.com/tatters/soundgen

Performs parametric synthesis of sounds with harmonic and noise components such as animal vocalizations or human voice. Also includes tools for spectral analysis, pitch tracking, audio segmentation, self-similarity matrices, morphing, etc.

Key functions

• Sound synthesis from R console: soundgen()
• Shiny app for sound synthesis (opens in a browser): soungen_app()
• Acoustic analysis of a wav/mp3 file: analyze()
• Shiny app for editing intonation contours (opens in a browser): pitch_app()
• Measuring syllables, pauses, and bursts in a wav/mp3 file: segment()

For more information, please see the vignettes on sound synthesis and acoustic analysis:

vignette("sound_generation", package="soundgen")

vignette("acoustic_analysis", package="soundgen")

Or, to open the vignettes in a browser:
RShowDoc('sound_generation', package = 'soundgen')

RShowDoc('acoustic_analysis', package = 'soundgen')

Example of sound synthesis

Use the soundgen() function to create a breathy moan:

s = soundgen(
  sylLen = 230,               # duration of voiced part, ms
  pitch = c(305, 280),        # pitch, Hz (goes down from 305 to 380 Hz)
  ampl = c(0, -20),           # amplitude, dB (gradual fade-out by 20 dB)
  rolloff = -30,              # strong f0, weak harmonics
  temperature = 0.05,         # some stochasticity in generation
  formants = c(260, 960, 1500, 2200,  # F1-F8 formant frequencies, Hz
               2600, 3600, 4200, 4500),
  noise = data.frame(
    time = c(-50, 120, 700),  # time of noise anchors
    value = c(-15, -5, -50)   # noise amplitude, dB
  ),
  rolloffNoise = 0,           # flat noise spectrum before adding formants
  addSilence = 0, samplingRate = 44100, pitchSamplingRate = 44100,
  play = TRUE, plot = TRUE, osc = TRUE, ylim = c(0, 6)
)

Example of acoustic analysis

Use the analyze() function to detect pitch and obtain other spectral descriptives of the sound we have just synthesized:

a = analyze(s, 44100, ylim = c(0, 6))
a$detailed[1:5, c('pitch', 'peakFreq', 'harmHeight', 'HNR', 'ampl', 'loudness')]
#>      pitch peakFreq harmHeight       HNR       ampl loudness
#> 1       NA       NA         NA        NA 0.02638271       NA
#> 2 295.1621 300.1361   296.6386  5.621424 0.15939804 10.50662
#> 3 296.6386 300.1361   593.2772 13.417414 0.36515952 18.01119
#> 4 296.4598 300.1361  1185.8392 13.250932 0.47913904 23.01556
#> 5 292.8389 300.1361  1231.4125 11.141331 0.45389806 22.25239
colnames(a)
#> NULL

Installation

To install the current release from CRAN: install.packages("soundgen")

NB: Make sure all dependencies have been installed correctly! For problems with seewave, see https://rug.mnhn.fr/seewave/

On Macs, you may need to do the following:

• First install brew according to the instructions here: https://brew.sh/
• Then run the following from the terminal
  brew install libsndfile
brew install fftw
• Finally, install soundgen in R:
  install.packages("soundgen")