Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by andi999 2118 days ago
Can you elaborate what you mean with real time sounds
2 comments

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.
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.