Sonic Pi is a new kind of musical instrument. Instead of strumming strings or whacking things with sticks – you write code – live.
Sonic Pi has been designed with the aim to find a harmonious balance between three core principles:
Simple enough for the 10 year old within you
Joyful enough for you to lose yourself through play
Powerful enough for your own expressions
Sonic Pi is a complete open source programming environment originally designed to explore and teach programming concepts within schools through the process of creating new sounds.
In addition to being an engaging education resource it has evolved into an extremely powerful and performance-ready live coding instrument suitable for professional artists and DJs.
Cabbage is a software for prototyping and developing audio instruments with the Csound audio synthesis language. Instrument development and prototyping is carried out with the main Cabbage IDE. Users write and compile Csound code in a code editor. If one wishes one can also create a graphical frontend, although this is no longer a requirement for Cabbage. Any Csound file can be run with Cabbage, regardless of whether or not it has a graphical interface. Cabbage is designed for realtime processing in mind. It is possible to use Cabbage to run Csound in the more traditional score-driven way, but your success may vary.
Cabbage is a ‘host’ application. It treats each and every Csound instrument as a unique audio plugin, which gets added to a digital audio graph (DAG) once it is compiled. The graph can be opened and edited at any point during a performance. If one wishes to use one of their Csound instruments in another audio plugin host, such as Reaper, Live, Bitwig, Ardour, QTractor, etc, they can export the instrument through the ‘Export instrument’ option.
ChucK is a programming language for real-time sound synthesis and music creation. It is open-source and freely available on MacOS X, Windows, and Linux. ChucK presents a unique time-based, concurrent programming model that’s precise and expressive (we call this strongly-timed), dynamic control rates, and the ability to add and modify code on-the-fly. In addition, ChucK supports MIDI, OpenSoundControl, HID device, and multi-channel audio. It’s fun and easy to learn, and offers composers, researchers, and performers a powerful programming tool for building and experimenting with complex audio synthesis / analysis programs, and real-time interactive music.
This is the synthesizer plug-in Surge which Claes Johanson (@kurasu) previously sold as a commercial product via the company vember audio.
As he is too busy with other projects and no longer wanted to put the effort into maintaining Surge across multiple platforms, he decided to give it a new life as an open-source project.
It was originally released in 2005, and was one of Claes’ first larger projects. It is reliable and sounds great.
Soundgrain is a graphical interface where users can draw and edit trajectories to control granular sound synthesis. Soundgrain is written with Python/WxPython and uses Pyo as its audio engine.
FluidSynth is a real-time software synthesizer based on the SoundFont 2 specifications and has reached widespread distribution. FluidSynth itself does not have a graphical user interface, but due to its powerful API several applications utilize it and it has even found its way onto embedded systems and is used in some mobile apps.
Features:
Cross platform support (Linux, macOS and Windows to name a few)
SoundFont 2 support
SoundFont 3 support (vorbis-compressed SF2)
Realtime effect control using SoundFont 2.01 modulators
Playback of MIDI files
Shared library which can be used in other programs
FluidPatcher is a performance-oriented interface for FluidSynth built using wxpython to create a simple GUI that allows live editing, selecting, and playing of patches. A patch is a collection of settings such as soundfont presets for each MIDI channel, control-change/sysex messages to send when the patch is selected, and midi router or effects settings. Groups of patches are stored in banks, which are saved as human-readable and -editable YAML files. This allows a musician to easily create complex combinations of synthesizer settings ahead of time and switch between them on the fly during a performance.
Features:
Live playing: Play on your MIDI controller and hear the results
Customization: Create your own combinations of instruments/effects
Extendability: Use the included libraries to design your own implementations/software
SonicBirth is an AudioUnit designing MacOS application. The first in its category, it allows users to build their own AudioUnit plugins, either by working with existing circuits or by creating circuits completely from scratch. SonicBirth is also a free AudioUnits package, as it comes bundled with a set of plugins designed for standalone use as plugins as well as pre-constructed circuits to modify or build upon for creating new plugins. Whether you’re looking for traditional eqs, compressors, and reverbs, or softsynths, distortion, and filters, etc., SonicBirth allows you unprecedented freedom and creativity over your sound.
eSpeak is a compact open source Linux and Windows speech synthesizer for English and other languages. eSpeak uses a “formant synthesis” method. This allows many languages to be provided in a small size. The speech is clear, and can be used at high speeds, but is not as natural or smooth as larger synthesizers which are based on human speech recordings.
eSpeak is available as:
A command line program (Linux and Windows) to speak text from a file or from stdin.
A shared library version for use by other programs. (On Windows this is a DLL).
A SAPI5 version for Windows, so it can be used with screen-readers and other programs that support the Windows SAPI5 interface.
eSpeak has been ported to other platforms, including Android, Mac OSX and Solaris.
padthv1 is an old-school polyphonic additive synthesizer with stereo fx; it is based on the PADsynth algorithm by Paul Nasca, as a special variant of additive synthesis.
Features:
a pure stand-alone JACK client with JACK-session, NSM (Non Session management) and both JACK MIDI and ALSA MIDI input support;
The Audio File 