I have a mosquito problem in my house. This wouldn't usually concern a programmers' community; However, I've seen some devices that claim to deter these nasty creatures by playing a 17Khz tone. I would like to do this using my laptop.
One method would be creating an MP3 with a a single, fixed-frequency tone (This can easily done by audacity), opening it with a python library and playing it repeatedly.
The second would be playing a sound using the computer built-in speaker. I'm looking for something similar to QBasic Sound:
SOUND 17000, 100
Is there a python library for that?
PyAudiere is a simple cross-platform solution for the problem:
>>> import audiere
>>> d = audiere.open_device()
>>> t = d.create_tone(17000) # 17 KHz
>>> t.play() # non-blocking call
>>> import time
>>> time.sleep(5)
>>> t.stop()
pyaudiere.org is gone. The site and binary installers for Python 2 (debian, windows) are available via the wayback machine e.g., here's source code pyaudiere-0.2.tar.gz
.
To support both Python 2 and 3 on Linux, Windows, OSX, pyaudio
module could be used instead:
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""Play a fixed frequency sound."""
from __future__ import division
import math
from pyaudio import PyAudio # sudo apt-get install python{,3}-pyaudio
try:
from itertools import izip
except ImportError: # Python 3
izip = zip
xrange = range
def sine_tone(frequency, duration, volume=1, sample_rate=22050):
n_samples = int(sample_rate * duration)
restframes = n_samples % sample_rate
p = PyAudio()
stream = p.open(format=p.get_format_from_width(1), # 8bit
channels=1, # mono
rate=sample_rate,
output=True)
s = lambda t: volume * math.sin(2 * math.pi * frequency * t / sample_rate)
samples = (int(s(t) * 0x7f + 0x80) for t in xrange(n_samples))
for buf in izip(*[samples]*sample_rate): # write several samples at a time
stream.write(bytes(bytearray(buf)))
# fill remainder of frameset with silence
stream.write(b'\x80' * restframes)
stream.stop_stream()
stream.close()
p.terminate()
Example:
sine_tone(
# see http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html
frequency=440.00, # Hz, waves per second A4
duration=3.21, # seconds to play sound
volume=.01, # 0..1 how loud it is
# see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate#Audio
sample_rate=22050 # number of samples per second
)
It is a modified (to support Python 3) version of this AskUbuntu answer.