[djaychela]

I haven't found a library for Python that does real time sounds in the way that old home computers (BBC micro etc) used to do. I got loads of pleasure when I was a teenager making sounds on my computer and hearing them back in real time, and I'd like to get that immediacy back (I have a theory that fewer kids are interested in programming than might otherwise be as it's much less immediate and accessible than it used to be).

If anyone knows of one, I'd love to know about it.

[erikschoster]

Pyo might fit the bill for you! http://ajaxsoundstudio.com/software/pyo/

[IdiocyInAction]

Programming is way more accessible than it's ever been.

[djaychela]

I disagree. 80s home computers camev with an interpreted language built in, and you were 5 seconds from power on to writing code. In addition, everything was accessible easily via comprehensible commands, directly. I don't think that's the case today, and in addition the bar is immensely higher than it was in the past. Commercial games in the early 80s looked like the kind of things you programmed yourself, whereas I think any title my kids play now looks like a cgi movie, and is the product of hundreds or thousands of people.

[labbeth]

Remembering me when I was retyping Basic listings from mid 80's magazines...

[andi999]

Can you elaborate what you mean with real time sounds

[djaychela]

The other day I was looking at an old BBC micro demo (cold tea) and thought about porting it to python for fun. In BBC basic there is a sound command which has 4 parameters, allowing you to play a sound straight away -not play back a wav file (a la pygame etc), but generate musical pitches easily with a single command. Other older era systems had similar commands, and that immediacy (both literally in terms of command leads directly to an audio output, as well as the command being a single line and easy to understand even for 11 year old me) is what I'm looking for.

[hnick]

As an example, DOS machines came with a form of BASIC and you had these: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QBasic/Sound

We had fun in school putting the SOUND command in a loop and either increasing or reducing the Hz to test our hearing and prove that yes, "old people" (such as our teachers who probably weren't much past 30) have terrible ears for higher pitched sounds.