muSYCL

Experimental muSYCaL framework around SYCL 2020

This is a small music synthesizer to experiment with C++23 programming, design patterns and acceleration on hardware accelerators like GPU, FPGA or CGRA with the SYCL 2020 standard.

It starts as a clean room implementation of a synthesizer to have a clean modern core architecture which can then be accelerated. So low-level features like pointers, macros, raw loops, etc. are avoided in the code as much as possible. Just mostly high-level generic and functional programming with C++ ranges, concepts...

This can be seen as a small DSL to define synthesizers in a programmatic way on steroids comparable to modular synthesizers in an electronic way.

This is a huge work-in-progress moving slowly and the most complex part is actually not making the sounds themselves but interfacing with a MIDI controller to have a playful experience...

Running the examples

This requires a modern C++ compiler, the Range-v3 library and for the musical side the RtMidi and AudioRt libraries, typically using JACK on Linux.

It relies also on some extensions from https://github.com/triSYCL/triSYCL

To get the latest precompiled Clang compiler you might look at https://apt.llvm.org/

To install these packages on Debian or Ubuntu, try:

sudo install clang-18 librange-v3-dev librtmidi-dev librtaudio-dev \
jackd2 qjackctl

and clone triSYCL somewhere.

In the top directory of the repository:

mkdir build
# Configure the project with the triSYCL repository somewhere
CXX=clang++-18 cmake .. -DCMAKE_MODULE_PATH=<absolute_path>/triSYCL/cmake \
  -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
# Build the project
cmake --build . --parallel `nproc` --verbose

Launch jackd, for example with qjackctl which allows to do the right connections between the audio and MIDI flows.

The main synthesizer to run is

• ./src/musycl_synth

but there are also some simple tests:

• ./experiment/audio generate a square wave with an evolving PWM;
• ./experiment/midi to list the MIDI interfaces and display what comes from the MIDI interface;
• ./experiment/synth a minimalistic monodic synthesizer.

To debug the project, add -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug configuration line of cmake. When using GDB, think to use:

handle SIG32 nostop

to ignore the noisy user signal 32 used by the audio/MIDI library.