[ros-users] Connecting ROS to a software (music) synthesiser?

[Federico Ferri]

On 11 Nov 2014 at 07:42:53, Raymond Sheh (raymond.sheh at curtin.edu.au) wrote:

> We're trying to figure out a way to have our robot's beeps be a little
> more musical and on-the-fly generated so I'm looking for a way of piping
> ROS messages into a software music synthesiser of some sort (or
> synthesizer for those of you in the US).
> 
> I've found lots of stuff about getting ROS to play sounds or to say text
> via a text-to-speech synth but I'm drawing a bit of a blank on something
> that is more musical.
> 
> Before I go to the trouble of connecting ROS to something like
> Supercollider or Fluidsynth, I was just wondering if anyone here knew of
> work already being done in this direction. My Google-fu is kinda failing
> me on this one.


There exists MIDI, which is a standard, consisting of a digital hardware interface and a transmission protocol. It exists since 80s and with this you can interface (almost) any hardware and software synthesizer and tone generator.

There is also the relatively new OSC, which is a protocol with similar purposes to MIDI (perhaps extending MIDI), but using modern networking medium.

I think it can make sense to develop a bridge between ROS and any of those standards.

My two cents.

Cheers,
Federico Ferri