The Tao Physical Modelling Sound Synthesis Program

Introduction

Tao is a software package for sound synthesis using physical models. It provides a virtual acoustic material based on point masses connected together with springs from which a wide variety of virtual musical instruments can be constructed. Tao can be used either as a stand-alone tool or as a C++ library for those who wish to incorporate its functionality into their own C++ programs or don't want to use the user interface provided.

Tao provides various objects such as bows, hammers, connectors and outputs for exciting the instruments, coupling them together and generating sound output. One of the main features of Tao is its 3-D graphics visualisations of the instrument constructed, showing how the acoustic waves propagate through the instruments.

Features

The main features of Tao are:

• A physically modelled elastic material from which a wide variety of virtual musical instruments can be constructed.

• The ability to produce very high quality organic' sounds, i.e. sounds which are much more acoustic' than those usually produced by digital synthesis.

• A set of virtual `devices' such as Bows, Hammers, Connectors and Outputs for coupling together, exciting and generating output from instruments.

• Real-time visualisations of the instruments showing in detail how the waves propagate through the various componnents.

• A well documented C++ API for those who want to develop their own programs making use of Tao's functionality (actually it is not documented yet but that part is the next priority).

Requirements

Tao has been built and tested on Ubuntu 16.04. It requires X windows and OpenGL compatible libraries and headers to be installed, either true OpenGL or a clone such as Brian Paul's Mesa3D, and Mark Kilgard's GLUT (GL Utility Toolkit) library and headers. It also requires Michael Pruett's port of the SGI audiofile library in order to write WAV format soundfiles.

Finally it requires the following tools in order to build it from source.

A C++ compiler      (preferably gnu g++ but the code should
                     compile perfectly well under others)
CMake               (build tool)
Doxygen             (a tool for generating documentation from
                     C++ sources)
Hyperlatex          (a tool for generating multi-format
                     documentation from LaTeX sources)

You only need Doxygen and Hyperlatex if you intend to build the documentation from the sources.

Tao works with both OpenGL and Mesa3D since the rendering used does not rely upon any advanced or esoteric features.

Steps for installation

Get the latest source with git:

git clone https://github.com/lucasw/tao_synth.git
mkdir build_tao_synth
cd build_tao_synth
cmake ../tao_synth -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<your path>
make
# make install TBD

Make your path somewhere on your system that your user has write permissions to and that is on your PATHs, this is an example of a bashrc configured to have a user install space in ~/other/install:

export DEST_DIR=$HOME/other/install
export CPATH=$CPATH:$DEST_DIR/include
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$DEST_DIR/lib/python/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DEST_DIR/lib:$DEST_DIR/usr/lib:$DEST_DIR/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=$DEST_DIR/bin:$PATH
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$DEST_DIR/lib/pkgconfig:$DEST_DIR/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH:$DEST_DIR/lib/cmake

Leaving out the prefix will require root permissions for make install, but you shouldn't really install random software as root on your system.

The `cmake' part checks to see if you have the necessary programs headers and libraries installed. If you do not the configuration will abort with a message telling you what is missing. See the earlier part of this README for details on where to get the components you need in order to use Tao.

Troubleshooting the configuration process

TBD

Continuing with the build process

Assuming the `make' works OK you should now have libtao.so and a directory full of example executables.

Testing Tao

Run an example to see if tao is working, first with visualization then without:

examples/strand -g

You should then see Tao's instrument visualisation window open. When this window opens initially Tao is in 'pause' mode. This gives you time to move, rotate and zoom the image before setting the synthesis in motion. To unpause Tao press the [right-arrow] cursor key. This should set the instrument in motion. For more information on what to do next refer to the User Manual.

examples/strand

This should run through the visualization rapidly then output one or more .dat files that can be converted to wav files for listening.