chordspeak

Speak a chord, get MIDI out. A project by Peter Nyboer, Kensaku Komatsu, and Alana Stevenson for the MIDI Hackathon at Google, 10/28/16 and 10/29/16.

##Basic Idea Using a microphone, speak a chord name and any modifiers (like sharp, transpose, diminshed, expand, octave), and a chord is calculated generated and sent out a MIDI port either as a chord or as arpeggiation. A C.H.I.P. computer is used as a device to serve a web-based interface for speech-to-text, parse the resulting string for musical commands, then generate MIDI output to a synthesizer over USB MIDI.

Run the program on C.H.I.P. from the server/

python server.py "Name Of MIDI Port"

You can get the "Name Of MIDI Port" with the command amidi -l which lists all available MIDI ports. There is a bit of a delay, mostly while the OpenSSL module is loaded, after which you will get a terminal output like so:

* Running on https://george.local:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

##Setup We are using Python to create MIDI generation functions and send calls to the Web Speech API to convert speech to text.

###General There are several dependencies that are satisfied with this setup script. This may be a bit more than you need, but it will make the rest of the installation and any future work easier.

###MIDI The mido python library seems to work well for MIDI i/o. The documentation is clear and the API is easy to understand. To install mido, just use these simple commands:

sudo pip install mido
sudo apt-get install librtmidi-dev libportmidi-dev

(I'm not entirely sure that librtmidi-dev is needed, but I'm too lazy to fully investigate.)

###Server The Flask server has some dependencies as well:

sudo pip install Flask
sudo pip install flask-cors
sudo pip install google-api-python-client
sudo pip install pyopenssl

##You May Want To Change...

• In midiout.py, you can change the default MIDI port. It's currently set to portname = 'MicroBrute MIDI 1'
• In server.py, you can change the 'host' from the SSL context in the very last line of the script. This might be needed if the name "george.local" can't be resolved for some reason, or you want to use the IP address, or get rid of it entirely.

##About The Files In This Repository

###server

####midiout.py A python module that creates a Chord object that can be modified and played as MIDI by some simple functions. These functions are designed to be executed by voice control.

####server.py The main script that:

• serves a web page to processes speech commands (from static)
• parses strings from the speech-to-text results (def parser())
• executes functions from midiout module (midiout.py)
• outputs MIDI notes (midiout.py)

There is also a keys/ directory that has self-signed keys for running the Flask server with https. The testscript.py was used to test out and develop the command parsing function.

####static/speech.html Provides an interface to Web Speech API for speech to text conversion.

###Example Code

####midi Used to test out and make sure the mido library worked as expected on the C.H.I.P.

####speech2text Used to test Google Cloud Speech API with python. In the end, however, we just used the browser integration for this.

####testwav In testing the Speech API, we created some test sound files of speech so we had a consistent source in an otherwise noisy area. Originally stereo 44.1K WAV, we had to convert them to RAW. The sox command was helpful:

sudo apt-get install sox
sox C.wav --channels=1 --bits=16 --rate=16000 --encoding=signed-integer --endian=little C.raw