Vocal Percussion

Build inspired by Beat Box, a linked-list excersise at the Turing School of Software and Design. While the project guidelines are structured around development on MacOS, this project was built entirely using Debian 6.1.52-1 (2023-09-07) x86_64 GNU/Linux.

What is a Linked List?

A linked list is a linear data structure used in computer science to organize elements in a sequence. Each element in the linked list is known as a node, and it contains data along with a reference (or link) to the next node in the sequence. This allows for efficient insertion or removal of elements from any position in the list.

Installation

This application utilizes your operating system's built-in text to speech program. You may need to install this program, especially if using this program outside of MacOS.

Linux/Debian

Ensure your package manager is up to date:

  sudo apt update

Download and install necessary gems

  bundle update
  bundle install

This project is built using festival, however there are other options such as espeak. If you have neither, lets proceed with espeak:

  sudo apt install espeak

Once installed, you can test for a properespeak installation by issuing the following command:

 espeak -s 175 "Hello World"

For guidance on troubleshooting issues during this installation step, check out the Possible Issues and Fixes segment.

Usage

This program allows you to utilize your systems TTS program to "Beat Box" or repeat an argument given in the command line with a customizable voice (default english-us) and rate (default 500).espeak --voices=en-us will list your english-speaking options, which then can be passed to this program as one of the arguments in the following format :

$ ruby vocal_percussion.rb -r <rate> -v <voice_selection> <sounds>

$ espeak --voices=en-us
Pty Language Age/Gender VoiceName          File          Other Languages
 2  en-us          M  english-us           en-us         (en-r 5)(en 3)
 5  en-us          F  us-mbrola-1          mb/mb-us1     (en 8)
 5  en-us          M  us-mbrola-2          mb/mb-us2     (en 7)
 ...
 5  en-sc          M  en-scottish          other/en-sc   (en 4)

$ ruby vocal_percussion.rb -v en-scottish "deep dop dop deep"
  # will playback using custom voice with the default rate of 500

Alternatively, you can opt to playback using a default voice with a custom rate, or customize both:

$  ruby vocal_percussion.rb -r 100 "deep dop dop deep"
$  ruby vocal_percussion.rb -v en-scottish -r 100 "deep dop dop deep"

List of Currently Supported Beats

Currently, the program only supports a set list of "beats". If the TTS states "List Empty!", it's likely that youve passed in an invalid beat.

Supported:

"tee", "dee", "deep", "bop", "boop", "la", "na", "ditt", "doo", "woo", "hoo", "shu", "dop"

Possible Issues and Fixes

❗ Inability to view coverage metrics

This application uses SimpleCov for test coverage observability. If you are using a debian/ubuntu system, instead of open coverage/index.html it's suggested to install something like xdg-utils, and run xdg-open coverage/index.html to see test coverage metrics. More details contained within the SimpleCov documentation.

4D-Coder/vocal_percussion