Pointillism

A compositional library for musical composition.

Examples

If you want to see pointillism in action and what it's capable of, run the examples in the examples folder.

Note: Some examples may be loud, dissonant, and/or jarring. Hearing discretion is advised.

Design

The way in which pointillism outputs audio is by writing sample by sample into a 32-bit floating point .wav file. Internal calculations use 64-bit floating points.

For convenience, the [Signal] trait is provided. Types implementing this trait generate sample data frame by frame. If the type also implements [SignalMut], it can be advanced or retriggered.

Signals may be composed to create more complex signals, using for instance the [MapSgn] and [MutSgn] structs. Moreover, you can implement the [Signal] and [SignalMut] traits for your own structs, giving you vast control over the samples you're producing.

We categorize signals into two broad families. Signals that generate audio on their own are called generators. Their names are suffixed by Gen. Signals that modify the output from another signal are called effects.

Compile-time

You can think of pointillism as a compile-time modular synthesizer, where every new struct is its own module.

Advantages of this design are extensibility and generality. It's relatively easy to create a highly customizable and complex signal with many layers by composing some functions together.

The downside is that these synths end up having unwieldy type signatures. Moreso, it's really hard to build synths in real time.

Features

The project uses the following features:

| Feature | Enables | |-|-| | hound* | An integration with hound. Allows you to save songs as WAV files. | | human-duration* | Pretty-printing for the [RawTime] type. | | cpal | An integration with cpal. Allows you to play songs in a dedicated thread. |

• Features marked with an asterisk are enabled by default.

Versions

The following versions of pointillism exist:

• 0.1.0 - 0.1.7: very early versions, have been yanked from crates.
• 0.2.0 - 0.2.10: more stable versions, but still subject to drastic change.
• 0.3.0 - 0.3.4: stable versions, tracked by a changelog.

Goals

Future goals of pointillism are:

• Filters (as soon as I learn what the word "biquad" means)
• Me making a whole album with it :D

Disclaimer

This is a passion project made by one college student. I make no guarantees on it being well-designed, well-maintained, or useable for your own goals.

That said, if you happen to stumble across this and make something cool, please let me know!