Sound is a very personal part of a project. Everyone has their particular vision of how something sounds.
To experiment with sounds, the sound creation program below may be used. The program comes with several pre-programmed sounds:
Ruff or woof are conventional representations in the English language of the barking of a dog. Onomatopoeia or imitative sounds, vary in other cultures: people "hear" a dog's barks differently and represent them in their own ways. Some of the equivalents of "woof" in other European and Asian languages are in Wikipedia. You can hear different sounds at the wonderful website http://www.bzzzpeek.com/.
Part of the creative process is making your animal sound like what you believe it should sound like. This will probably involve a fair amount of experimentation. Sampled real sounds take up too much memory for Trinket and a ROM takes too many microcontroller pins. So the method used here is turning a digital pin on and off very fast to make sounds at various frequencies.
If you have an Arduino Uno/Leonardo/Mega/etc. handy, you can use a serial monitor to select frequencies using a potentiometer and see the values on the serial monitor. If you have a Trinket, you can listen to a tone but not see the output frequency easily.
You can add frequency / duration values together to make more complex sounds. You can also vary a tone up or down to get effects you want. Map out your sound into component sounds, for example "meow" for a cat. Start with the M sound: use the varyFrequency function to find a "mmm" (maybe 5100). The sound is short so we try 50 milliseconds. The "e" is "eeee", lasts longer, so the frequency 394 sounded right and the sound is longer so trial and error got 180 milliseconds. The "o" is a more complex sound, starting high (990) and getting a bit lower (1022). How long you run the loop and specify the duration for each sound will vary the sound. Finally "w" is enough like "m" that I repeat it as I could find no better sound. That is meeeow. You can also see meoooow and mew as variations. You may feel they do not sound enough cat-like which is ok, you can define your purr-fect sound using these methods.
To experiment with sounds, the sound creation program below may be used. The program comes with several pre-programmed sounds:
- A bird chirp
- Cat meows (a meeee-ow, a me-oooow, and a mew)
- Dog sounds (ruff and arf)
Ruff or woof are conventional representations in the English language of the barking of a dog. Onomatopoeia or imitative sounds, vary in other cultures: people "hear" a dog's barks differently and represent them in their own ways. Some of the equivalents of "woof" in other European and Asian languages are in Wikipedia. You can hear different sounds at the wonderful website http://www.bzzzpeek.com/.
Part of the creative process is making your animal sound like what you believe it should sound like. This will probably involve a fair amount of experimentation. Sampled real sounds take up too much memory for Trinket and a ROM takes too many microcontroller pins. So the method used here is turning a digital pin on and off very fast to make sounds at various frequencies.
If you have an Arduino Uno/Leonardo/Mega/etc. handy, you can use a serial monitor to select frequencies using a potentiometer and see the values on the serial monitor. If you have a Trinket, you can listen to a tone but not see the output frequency easily.
You can add frequency / duration values together to make more complex sounds. You can also vary a tone up or down to get effects you want. Map out your sound into component sounds, for example "meow" for a cat. Start with the M sound: use the varyFrequency function to find a "mmm" (maybe 5100). The sound is short so we try 50 milliseconds. The "e" is "eeee", lasts longer, so the frequency 394 sounded right and the sound is longer so trial and error got 180 milliseconds. The "o" is a more complex sound, starting high (990) and getting a bit lower (1022). How long you run the loop and specify the duration for each sound will vary the sound. Finally "w" is enough like "m" that I repeat it as I could find no better sound. That is meeeow. You can also see meoooow and mew as variations. You may feel they do not sound enough cat-like which is ok, you can define your purr-fect sound using these methods.
/*******************************************************************
Adafruit Animal - Sound testing module
Works on Arduino Uno, Leonardo, Mega, Menta, etc.
can work on Trinket with right pin mapping and no Serial port
*******************************************************************/
// pins
#define SPEAKER 11 // Piezo Speaker pin (positive, other pin to ground)
#define POT A0 // for Trinket, use 1 for #2, 3 for #3, 2 for #4
// for Uno/Leo/Mega A0 to A5
// define serial if using debug on Uno/Leo/Mega, Trinket/Gemma comment out
#define SERIAL
void setup() {
#ifdef SERIAL
Serial.begin(9600);
#endif
pinMode(SPEAKER,OUTPUT); // important to set pin as output
}
void loop() {
// varyFrequency(); // uncomment to search for correct tone value
// the sounds below are defined - comment out those you do not want or
// comment out if using varyFrequency() to select play with tones
chirp();
delay(2000);
meow();
delay(2000);
meow2();
mew();
delay(2000);
ruff();
delay(2000);
arf();
delay(2000);
// scale(); // if you would like to hear the whole frequency
// range, you can use this function
}
void varyFrequency() {
// use potentiometer to produce one tone per value of pot
// good for getting pitch value to use in making sound routines
int reading;
const uint8_t scale = 1; // 1 for high frequencies, scale up to 15 for lowest freqs
reading = scale * analogRead(POT);
playTone(reading, 1000);
#ifdef SERIAL
Serial.print("Freq = ");
Serial.println(reading);
#endif
}
void chirp() { // Bird chirp
for(uint8_t i=200; i>180; i--)
playTone(i,9);
}
void meow() { // cat meow (emphasis ow "me")
uint16_t i;
playTone(5100,50); // "m" (short)
playTone(394,180); // "eee" (long)
for(i=990; i<1022; i+=2) // vary "ooo" down
playTone(i,8);
playTone(5100,40); // "w" (short)
}
void meow2() { // cat meow (emphasis on "ow")
uint16_t i;
playTone(5100,55); // "m" (short)
playTone(394,170); // "eee" (long)
delay(30); // wait a tiny bit
for(i=330; i<360; i+=2) // vary "ooo" down
playTone(i,10);
playTone(5100,40); // "w" (short)
}
void mew() { // cat mew
uint16_t i;
playTone(5100,55); // "m" (short)
playTone(394,130); // "eee" (long)
playTone(384,35); // "eee" (up a tiny bit on end)
playTone(5100,40); // "w" (short)
}
void ruff() { // dog ruff
uint16_t i;
for(i=890; i<910; i+=2) // "rrr" (vary down)
playTone(i,3);
playTone(1664,150); // "uuu" (hard to do)
playTone(12200,70); // "ff" (long, hard to do)
}
void arf() { // dog arf
uint16_t i;
playTone(890,25); // "a" (short)
for(i=890; i<910; i+=2) // "rrr" (vary down)
playTone(i,5);
playTone(4545,80); // intermediate
playTone(12200,70); // "ff" (shorter, hard to do)
}
// play tone on a piezo speaker: tone shorter values produce higher frequencies
// which is opposite beep() but avoids some math delay - similar to code by Erin Robotgrrl
void playTone(uint16_t tone1, uint16_t duration) {
if(tone1 < 50 || tone1 > 15000) return; // these do not play on a piezo
for (long i = 0; i < duration * 1000L; i += tone1 * 2) {
digitalWrite(SPEAKER, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(tone1);
digitalWrite(SPEAKER, LOW);
delayMicroseconds(tone1);
}
}
// another sound producing function similar to http://web.media.mit.edu/~leah/LilyPad/07_sound_code.html
void beep (int16_t frequencyInHertz, long timeInMilliseconds) {
long x;
long delayAmount = (long)(1000000/frequencyInHertz);
long loopTime = (long)((timeInMilliseconds*1000)/(delayAmount*2));
for (x=0;x<loopTime;x++) {
digitalWrite(SPEAKER,HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(delayAmount);
digitalWrite(SPEAKER,LOW);
delayMicroseconds(delayAmount);
}
}
void scale() {
for(uint16_t i=50; i<15000; i++) {
playTone(i,20);
}
}
