Make xenharmonic music and explore musical tunings.

Overview

microwave is a microtonal waveform synthesizer based on:

• tune – a microtonal library
• Nannou – a UI framework
• FluidLite – a soundfont renderer

It features a virtual piano UI enabling you to play polyphonic microtonal melodies with your touch screen, keyboard or mouse. The UI provides information about pitches and just intervals in custom tuning systems.

Installation

cargo install -f microwave

You might need to install additional dependencies required by Nannou. For me, the following setup worked:

sudo apt install pkg-config libx11-dev

If this doesn't help or you don't use apt, try following these instructions.

Usage

You can run microwave in continuous or scale-based mode:

microwave              # Continuous
microwave equal 1:22:2 # 22-EDO scale

For playback of sampled sounds provide the location of a soundfont file:

microwave -s /usr/share/sounds/sf2/default-GM.sf2 equal 1:22:2

If you want to load compressed sf3 files you need to enable the sf3 feature. Note that the startup will be a lot slower since the sondfont file needs to be decompressed first.

After everything has been loaded you should see a window showing a virtual keyboard.

Use your touch screen, keyboard or mouse to play melodies on the virtual piano.

To see how scale expressions work, visit tune.