Play do-re-mi musical notes (each lasting 1 sec) on Python

Question

My son plays a string instrument that sounds terribly out of tune. I would prefer him to learn some simple Python programming to play do-re-mi notes that really sound like do-re-mi.

As a start, I would like to play do-re-mi with each note lasting 1 second duration on Python. Can this be easily done on Python? Easy means the code can be explained to a 10-year-old kid or at least not so difficult that he is put off.

I am using Python 2.7 on Windows 7.

Answer 1

Sounds like you are trying to program a synthesizer using python... Not a simple task. However if you do not require any smooth transition from one note to the next, and no tempo change etc. i.e. just have the program recite the notes in "Close Contact of 3rd kind" fashion, I guess you could store the digital notes in regular sound files. Have an array of these filenames, in what order you want to play them, then just issue the command to play the notes one at a time with a wait in between. There are a number of python sound libraries: Snack sound, pyMedia, pyglet, winsound (build-in to the windows python), pygame, wxPython (probably a lot more)

I like the simplicity of pygame:

import pygame
import time
notes = ['note1.mp3', 'note2.mp3', 'note3.mp3', 'note4.mp3']
pygame.init()

for note in notes:
    pygame.mixer.music.load(note)
    pygame.mixer.music.play()
    time.sleep(2)

Answer 2

Here it might take a little bit to learn but try PyAudio. You may have to def some functions to generate the sound waves (represented by strings). Other options include winsound, Nsound, sunau, etc it depends how you want to play the sound.