barelymusician

barelymusician is a real-time music engine for interactive systems.

It provides a modern C/C++ API to generate and perform musical sounds from scratch in a sample accurate way.

This repository includes build targets for Linux, OSX, Windows, Android, and Daisy platforms, in addition to a native Unity game engine plugin*.

To use in a project, simply include barelymusician.h.

To use in Unity, download the latest version of barelymusician.unitypackage.

For background about this project, see the original research paper here, and the legacy Unity implementation here.

Example usage

#include "barelymusician.h"

// Create the musician.
barely::Musician musician(/*sample_rate=*/48000);

// Set the global tempo to 124 beats per minute.
musician.SetTempo(/*tempo=*/124.0);

// Add an instrument.
auto instrument = musician.AddInstrument();

// Set the instrument gain to -6dB.
instrument.SetControl(barely::ControlType::kGain, /*value=*/-6.0);

// Set an instrument note on.
//
// Note pitch is centered around the reference frequency, and measured in octaves. Fractional values
// adjust the frequency logarithmically to maintain perceived pitch intervals in each octave.
constexpr double kC4Pitch = 0.0;
instrument.SetNoteOn(kC4Pitch, /*intensity=*/0.25);

// Check if the instrument note is on.
const bool is_note_on = instrument.IsNoteOn(kC4Pitch);  // will return true.

// Add a performer.
auto performer = musician.AddPerformer();

// Set the performer to loop.
performer.SetLooping(/*is_looping=*/true);

// Add a looping task that plays an instrument note every beat.
auto task = performer.AddTask(
    [&]() {
      // Set an instrument note on.
      instrument.SetNoteOn(/*pitch=*/1.0);
      // Schedule a one-off task to set the instrument note off after half a beat.
      performer.ScheduleOneOffTask([&]() { instrument.SetNoteOff(/*pitch=*/1.0); },
                                   performer.GetPosition() + 0.5);
    },
    /*position=*/0.0);

// Start the performer.
performer.Start();

// Update the musician timestamp in seconds.
//
// Timestamp updates must occur before processing instruments with their respective timestamps.
// Otherwise, such `Process` calls will be *late* to receive the relevant state changes. To
// compensate for this, `Update` should typically be called from a main thread update callback with
// an additional "lookahead" to avoid potential thread synchronization issues that could arise in
// real-time audio applications.
constexpr double kLookahead = 0.1;
double timestamp = 0.0;
musician.Update(timestamp + kLookahead);

// Process the next output samples of the instrument.
//
// Instruments process raw PCM audio samples in a synchronous call. Therefore, `Process` should
// typically be called from an audio thread process callback in real-time audio applications.
double output_samples[1024];
instrument.Process(output_samples, timestamp);

Further examples can be found in examples/demo, e.g. to run the instrument_demo.cpp:

python build.py --run_demo instrument_demo