Make xenharmonic music and explore musical tunings.
microwave is a microtonal waveform synthesizer based on:
It features a virtual piano UI enabling you to play polyphonic microtonal melodies with your touch screen, computer keyboard, MIDI keyboard or mouse. The UI provides information about pitches and just intervals in custom tuning systems.
bash
cargo install -f microwave
You might need to install additional dependencies required by Nannou. For me, the following setup worked:
bash
sudo apt install pkg-config libx11-dev
If this doesn't help or you don't use apt, try following these instructions.
bash
microwave # 12-EDO scale (default)
microwave equal 1:22:2 # 22-EDO scale
microwave import my_scale.scl # imported scale
This should spawn a window displaying a virtual keyboard. Use your touch screen, computer keyboard or mouse to play melodies on the virtual piano.
For playback of sampled sounds you need to provide the location of a soundfont file. The location can be set via the environment variable MICROWAVE_SF or the command line:
bash
microwave --sf /usr/share/sounds/sf2/default-GM.sf2 equal 1:22:2
If you like to use compressed sf3 files you need to compile microwave with the sf3 feature enabled. Note that the startup will take significantly longer since the soundfont needs to be decompressed first.
To use a MIDI device as an input source, use the --ms option:
bash
microwave --ms 1 equal 1:22:2
For a complete list of command line options run
bash
microwave help