Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] using GNU radio to generate audio signals

[Tom Rondeau]

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 2:59 PM, Brad Buran <address@hidden> wrote:
> In our research lab we generate a variety of audio signals to study
> auditory perception.  These signals include pure tones (ramped on/off
> by cosine squared envelopes), amplitude-modulated noise, sequences of
> signals (noise followed by a tone, etc.), band-limited noise, etc.
>
> Once we generate the waveform, we upload it to an external hardware
> device that plays the signal out to a speaker.
>
> GNU radio seems like a very interesting project because it looks like
> it can generate a continuous waveform as a series of frames which we
> could then upload to the external device.  If I understand GNU radio
> correctly, this would allow us to fine-tune the output signal in
> real-time (e.g. adjust modulation frequency, etc) and the next frame
> would have the updated signal (rather than having to recompute the
> entire waveform).
>
> Does this sound like a reasonable use case for GNU radio?  Would we be
> able to grab the output of the block "chain" and upload it to the
> hardware ourselves?  It looks like using a vector sink may work for
> that purpose.
>
> Thanks,
> Brad Buran
> Postdoctoral Fellow
> Center for Neural Science
> New York University


Brad,
Yes, GNU Radio should work well for your purposes. The vector_sink
would work, but that's usually not recommended for full-blown
applications; we usually use it for testing. You could generate the
signal and save it to a file, then replay the file through your
hardware. There are other solutions we could discuss, too, that could
allow you to talk directly to your hardware.

Tom