Whistle control your computer (Linux&Mac)

    5 minutes read | 994 words by Ruben Berenguel
From flickr

From flickr

Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac. Bigger problem: it is slightly outdated and short on some details. And the script had a small problem that had to be solved.

In this post you will find

  • How to install a modified sndpeek in Mac (OS X 10.5.8) and Linux (Ubuntu 9.04+Fluxbox)
  • Modifications needed by cmdWhistle.pl, the main whistly script to run in Mac OSX
  • Modifications I needed to compile sndpeek in Ubuntu
  • How to use it
  • Examples

Instructions for MacOS X

The first and most important ingredient is having th set of compilers… if you don’t have gcc and the developer-related software, you can’t do anything. Assuming you do (your “Extra” CD of Mac OS installation contains everything needed), you’ll need to download:

  • cmdWhistle.pl from here. Browse to the bottom of this page, it is where I got the instructions. You should take a look at it.

  • sndpeek source from here

After you have the source code, go to your editor of choice, open src/sndpeek/sndkpeek.cpp and add the following line

fflush(stdout);

just after (yes, I know the following line is damn long!)

fprintf( stdout, "%.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f %.2f ",
mfcc(0), mfcc(1), mfcc(2), mfcc(3), mfcc(4), mfcc(5), mfcc(6), mfcc(7), mfcc(8), mfcc(9), mfcc(10), mfcc(11), mfcc(12) );  
fprintf( stdout, "\\n" );

This refreshes the printout every so often to the terminal window, to interact with the script. Now open a terminal window, navigate to src/sndpeek and type make osx. It worked for me just out of the box… if you run into some problem… ask Google, then ask me, although Google is a best bet. Then, sudo make install, so you can execute it. Now go to a terminal and try to execute sndpeek. It should give you some nice output like the following image, if your microphone works and you are whistling.

Whistle!

Whistle!

After this, I needed to create the set of intermediate perl headers from C headers… Because cmdWhistle complained about them. I found the info here. You just have to (corrected a typo: thanks Rhettigan!)

sudo cd /usr/include
sudo h2ph \*.h \*/\*.h

from a terminal window.

After this you can try to get some whistles in, but in my case, the script didn’t work: it wasn’t able to get correctly the time of day (via gettimeofday() in the C headers). To test it, go to the folder where you have cmdWhistle, and write

sndpeek --nodisplay --print | perl cmdWhistle.pl -c

and whistle a couple of times (a simple whistle, repeated two times with a small delay from one to the other, then remain silent for a couple seconds). You should get something like this output:

enter a tone sequence: Tone: 77.00 ## last: [925263] curr: [0] difference is: 925263 Tone: 81.00 ## last: [925848] curr: [925263] difference is: 585 place the following line in /Users/ruben/.toneFile

77.00 81.00 _#_ 0 585 _#_ (command here) _#_

If you don’t, probably means your time-getting code also don’t work. Go and edit cmdWhistle by adding the following

use Time::HiRes;

after use strict; and replace subs getEpochSeconds and getEpochMicroSeconds by

sub getEpochMicroSeconds {
  my ($seconds, $microseconds) = Time::HiRes::gettimeofday;
  return($microseconds);
}#getEpochMicroSeconds
 
sub getEpochSeconds {
  my ($seconds, $microseconds) = Time::HiRes::gettimeofday;
  return($seconds);
}#getEpochSeconds

and it should work by now. Try it again. If it doesn’t… well, ask again.

Instructions for Linux (more or less distro-agnostic)

It should be easier in Linux. You also need to download, configure, make and sudo make install the library libsndfile from here. Then follow the steps from Mac OSX, editing sndpeek.cpp. Now try to make linux-alsa, or make linux-oss depending on which sound system do you have installed. I couldn’t get any one working… so I just went to synaptics package manager, installed ALSA’s developer libraries, and tried again make linux-alsa. All went fine… until compiling src/maryas/LPC.cpp. The compiler complained about the use of abs, the integer version of fabs, claiming it was undeclared. Just edit src/maryas/LPC.h, and add stdlib.h to the set of includes. It should work. Follow the directions for the Mac OS if it compiled now.

In a follow up story son I will give a patch I wrote to use it in my Aspire one… The microphone is not that accurate, and sndpeek+cmdWhistle always give 511 as a signal received (in a sndpeek image you can always see a peak).

How to Control Your Computer by Whistling?

The idea is to whistle a certain sequence of tones, and map it into a certain command. For example, you whistle a part of a tune you like… this opens Firefox. The first part, is to turn this tune into a set of tones and times. To do so,

sndpeek --nodisplay --print | perl cmdWhistle.pl -c

and just whistle to it. Then wait for a few seconds. The output should be as above, the important information is the last line:

place the following line in /Users/ruben/.toneFile

77.00 81.00 _#_ 0 585 _#_ (command here) _#_

Follow its advice! Open the suggested file, and this line is the set of tones and timings. Replace (command here) by… either open /Applications/Firefox.app or /usr/bin/firefox. To test if it does work,

sndpeek –nodisplay –print | perl cmdWhistle.pl -v

will try to map what you whistle with the stored whistles, without stop in verbose mode. To end it, press C-c. To run it without output, remove the -v flag.

Usage Example

In Mac OSX a useful command is show desktop. I have this in my notes file:

49.00 _#_ 0 _#_ osascript -e ‘tell application “System Events” to key code 103’ _#_ 103 is F11

Assuming you have the default keybindings, of course!