Open-source & India #11
github-audio, kira, spectro, beep & Kozhukatta and Gharanas of Hindustani Music
What are we discovering this week?
Hi there,
I am focusing on sounds today and trying to look for some interesting projects made around sound for casual developers and music lovers. You don’t have to understand how audio waves can be generated but look at this and wonder.
They are simple libraries and projects, that show interesting implementations around sounds that you might want to try on.
The culture sections boast the Indian classical music and families that still keep the tradition going on.
github-audio
Listen to music generated by events happening across GitHub 🎵🎷
This website tracks events happening across GitHub and converts them to music notes based on certain parameters.
There are three types of sounds(bell, string pluck and string swell) based on four types of events(PushEvent, PullRequestEvent, IssuesEvent and IssueCommentEvent). Bells represent PushEvents, string plucks represent IssuesEvents and IssueCommentEvents whereas string swells represent PullRequestEvents.
💻: JavaScript
⭐ 1691 👀 29 🍴 115 💬 19 📆 May 16 2021
kira
Kira is an audio library designed to help create expressive audio for games. Besides the common features you'd expect from an audio library, it provides interfaces for scripting audio events, seamlessly looping complex pieces of music, smoothly changing parameters, and more.
Kira should support all of the platforms supported by cpal. Windows, Linux, and WASM have been tested.
💻: Rust
⭐ 268 👀 6 🍴 8 💬 1 📆 May 16 2021
spectro
🎶 Spectro is a real-time audio spectrogram generator for the web. It can visualise sound from your microphone or audio files on your device.
Options available to control the appearance of the spectrogram:
🔊 Sensitivity controls how sensitive the spectrogram is to the audio. Changing it has the same effect as changing the volume of the audio.
🌗 Contrast applies logarithmic scaling to the spectrogram to add contrast to the image. Changing it can help produce a better image depending on the audio being analysed.
🔍 Zoom controls how zoomed in the spectrogram appears along the time axis.
📈 Min. and max. frequency control the range of frequencies to display on the spectrogram. Lower frequencies appear at the bottom of the spectrogram, and higher frequencies at the top.
🎹 Frequency scale controls the scaling to apply to the frequency axis of the spectrogram. 'Linear' means all frequencies are represented evenly, while 'Mel' gives a more natural appearance by giving more weight to lower frequencies.
🌈 Colour controls the colour scheme to display the spectrogram with.
💻: TypeScript
⭐ 399 👀 6 🍴 14 💬 2 📆 May 16 2021
beep
A little package that brings sound to any Go application. Suitable for playback and audio-processing.
Beep is built on top of its Streamer interface, which is like io.Reader, but for audio.
Decode and play WAV, MP3, OGG, and FLAC.
Encode and save WAV.
Very simple API. Limiting the support to stereo (two channel) audio made it possible to simplify the architecture and the API.
Rich library of compositors and effects. Loop, pause/resume, change volume, mix, sequence, change playback speed, and more.
Easily create new effects. With the
Streamer
interface, creating new effects is very easy.Generate completely own artificial sounds. Again, the
Streamer
interface enables easy sound generation.Very small codebase. The core is just ~1K LOC.
💻: Go
⭐ 1209 👀 18 🍴 82 💬 53 📆 May 16 2021
Love it ?!
A little about India, the food, the people and the culture
The Food
Kozhukatta
Kozhukatta or Kozhukattai (steamed rice balls with coconut and jaggery filling) is a popular sweet dish. Kozhukatta is prepared by Christians in Kerala, South India during Osana Perunal/ Kuruthola perunal/ Palm Sunday. Kozhukatta is prepared every year on either the previous day or the morning of Osana Perunal.
Though kozhukatta is prepared as a part of a custom, this can be made at any time as a tasty tea time snack. Kozhukatta is one of the favorite nallu mani palaharam (evening snack). The preparation of this dish is very simple, grated coconut is mixed with jaggery placed inside the rice flour dumplings, and steamed.
The People & The Culture
Gharanas of Hindustani Music
(The word gharānā comes from the Hindi word 'ghar' which is derived from the Sanskrit word Griha, which means 'house'. )
There is a rich tradition of Gharanas in classical Hindustani music. The music Gharanas are also called styles. These schools or Gharanas have their basis in the traditional mode of musical training and education. Every Gharana has its own distinct features. The main area of difference between Gharanas is the manner in which the notes are sung. The concept of a Guru- Shishya leads to the development of Gharanas. The Gharanas emerge from the creative style of a genius, who gives existing structures a totally new approach, form, and interpretation. The new approach, form, and interpretation apply to include the tone of the voice, the pitch, the inflections and the intonations, and the specific application of the various nuances.
Gharanas in Hindustani Classical Music are divided into two major categories – ‘Khyal’ and ‘Thumri’, based on the singing style or known as ‘Gayaki’ in Hindustani Classical Music.
Khayal
Khayal was popularized by Niyamat Khan (a.k.a. Sadarang) and his nephew Firoz Khan (a.k.a. Adarang), both musicians in the court of Muhammad Shah Rangeela. Khyal or Khayal is the modern genre of classical singing in North India. Its name comes from an Arabic word meaning "imagination".
Khyal bases itself on a repertoire of short songs (two to eight lines); a khyal song is called a bandish. Every singer generally renders the same bandish differently, with only the text and the raga remaining the same. Khyal bandishes are typically composed in a variant of Urdu/Hindi, and sometimes in Marathi or Punjabi, and these compositions cover diverse topics, such as romantic or divine love, praise of kings or gods, the seasons, dawn and dusk, and the pranks of Krishna, and they can have symbolism and imagery
Thumri
The thumri is the most popular form of Indian music cultivated by individuals, as distinguished from that spontaneous form of music cultivated by communities or social groups. It is, therefore, designated as classical music, as distinguished from folk music. It is comparatively more free of those restrictions of strict discipline which form part of orthodox classical music. For this reason, it is called 'light' classical music.
As denoted by its feminine name the thumri is characterized by a striking note of tenderness and the theme of its songs is invariably related to some or the other phase of human love in a stage of separation or union. The thumri lacks that virility of musical expression associated with the dhrupad and khayal styles; we must remember that both these are masculine names. The songs in these manly styles do not always have a love for their theme.
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