audio - Python library for playing fixed-frequency sound

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.