Soundfonts, TTS, WIndows Support & Helper functions

[james-trayford]

• Supporting Soundfont files (.sf2) in the Sampler:
  • Read and select presets from soundfont files
  • Add an example with a stellar light curve (notebooks and scripts)
  • Add some sampler presets that help with using soundfonts
  • Make sure to ignore sf2 files in git so we don't end up committing these big files...
• Integrating Text-to-speech (TTS)
  • Add 'caption' functionality to allow you to annotate sonifications in strauss
  • Add example notebooks for local and Colab examples and script
  • Add TTS requirements as an 'extra' to strauss. This is because of the very specific module requirements of the TTS modules. you can install this extra for captioning functionality.
  • Windows support
  • ensure that strauss runs on windows via platform-independent file pathing
  • Loopable sonifications
  • add helper function to make sonifications that loop seamlessly - particularly for Spectraliser applications.

Note the examples/colab directory containing versions of the notebooks with preambles that allow them to run in Google Colab. This can be opened using the github URL to the file and changing github.com to githibtocolab.com. This provides a way to test the notebooks in a 'fresh' environment. In particular, the examples/colab/AudioCaption.ipynb example by default should install the TTS extras to strauss. Without these extras captioning still fail, but all other aspects of strauss should work. Some of the default Colab modules don't play well with these modules, but examples should still work (though may complain and ask to reset the runtime)

The Colab notebooks won't work by default at the moment, as they're designed to pip install strauss from PyPI (and they're not there yet). When open in Colab, can change:

%pip --quiet install strauss

to

%pip --quiet install "strauss @ git+https://github.com/james-trayford/strauss.git@development"

for this development branch. In the case of the examples/colab/AudioCaption.ipynb example, for the full functionality need to specify the TTS extras for strauss, so:

%pip --quiet install "strauss[TTS] @ git+https://github.com/james-trayford/strauss.git@development"

[james-trayford]

To do:

• need to invoke %matplotlib inline AFTER import plt in all notebooks ✔️
• do away with interactive interface for soundfont loader (when no preset number provided) ✔️

Note: Need to add !git checkout -b development origin/development line after the %cd strauss/examples/ line to get all the examples to work in Colab