Audio / tone generator for classroom demonstrations

May 23, 2013 5:42 PM

I'm teaching a college section on audio perception, and I'm looking for (preferably free) tone generation software for classroom demonstrations -- in particular, something that will let me control the level of the individual harmonics independently. It would be great there was also the capacity to control the ADSR envelope, but that's less important. I'd also be interested to hear about anything else that people have found useful for a class like this. Thanks!
posted by svenx to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I'm pretty sure Cool Edit Pro/Adobe Audition let you do this (not sure about the ADSR envelope) but it definitely had some tone generation and/or noise shaping options.
posted by TwoWordReview at 6:12 PM on May 23, 2013

ARTA, and other RTA type programs tend to have good tone generators. The one in ARTA can do square and sine generation, many different types of noise generators, and it can do two-sine generation too (used for measuring distortion products of audio transducers.)

It's funny, I was actually playing with an online java applet which changed tone by moving sliders around corresponding to harmonics, it was really cool, but it didn't have any ADSR functionality.

I feel like a really good musical synthesizer might have the functionality you need.

Also this might work.
posted by Teakettle at 6:39 PM on May 23, 2013

Response by poster: I was actually playing with an online java applet which changed tone by moving sliders around corresponding to harmonics

That would be great -- I know there are lots of good tone generators, but I've yet to find one that lets me adjust the harmonics like that. Do you remember where you found it?
posted by svenx at 7:02 PM on May 23, 2013

Let me look around for it again, there were a bunch of them.
posted by Teakettle at 7:55 PM on May 23, 2013

Here you go: Fourier Series Applet
posted by Teakettle at 8:00 PM on May 23, 2013 [1 favorite]

Audiomulch can do all kinds of splendid things... but it might take a fair bit of setting up to get it to do exactly what you want.
posted by ZipRibbons at 12:53 AM on May 24, 2013