lab 3 - wavefs

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NAME

lab 3 - create a filesystem, wavefs, that serves a looped waveform. This is our staring point for playing with DSP.

SETUP

Inferno 4th edition release 20040830. Using styxservers(2), audio(3), audio(6). and Synthesis Toolkit in C++ stk. Emu is running hosted on Windows XP. (I haven't gotten the sound figured out yet using esd.)

DESCRIPTION

I've been looking for tools to experiment with DSP. The synthesis toolkit has a good all round collection of DSP routines and the code is easy enough to read. I wanted this "sound workbench" well integrated with inferno. Where possible make the resources files or file2chans.

The first step was to make a sound source; an oscillator. For this I created a file server that serves two files 

/ctl
/data

I started with the sample code from styxservers-nametree(2). The server is given a raw audio file to loop. I took the example raw files included in the STK distribution. These are 16bit mono, big-endian two's complement.

The data file served is an unlimited stream of data in 16bit mono, little-endian, two's complement suitable for streaming to /dev/audio 

% mkdir /mnt/dsp
% mount {wavefs sinewave.raw} /mnt/dsp
% echo rate 22050 > /dev/audioctl
% echo chans 1 > /dev/audioctl
% read 40000 < /mnt/dsp/wave > /dev/audio

Reading the ctl file describes attributes of the sound file, similar to /dev/audioctl Change attributes, such as pitch, by writing to ctl. For example to create a sinewave rising in pitch 

{for (i in `{seq 300 10 700}) {
 echo pitch $i > /n/dsp/wavectl; 
 read 4000 < /n/dsp/wave }
}> /dev/audio

seq is a port of the plan9 command.

I made some helper programs to look at the wave form. 

% read < 100 /mnt/dsp/wave |pcm |gr

The ffts doesn't seem to work, or I misunderstand how to use it.

CONCLUSION

These are the final versions: pcm.b gr.b wavefs.b ffts.b seq.b And here is the sinewave from the STK package. sinwave.raw Given the above I have a model to build a family of fileservers. Each serves a ctl and data file. Reading from data always reads the sound samples in a format suitable for /dev/audio and writing to ctl controls the effect, filter, or oscillator.

The filesystems can be layered. So a filter is started by giving it as parameter the wave file 

% mount {wavefs sinewave.raw} /mnt/dsp
% mount {lowpfs /mnt/dsp/wave} /mnt/dsp

And so on. It'll be interesting to see how layering filesystems on a larger scale works out. A patch bay of filesystems may be required.

This is also an excuse to learn about DSP.

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