techno-gen

Generates infinite procedural techno music as raw float32 stereo audio on stdout. 138 BPM. No samples — everything is synthesized from scratch.

Build

make

Or manually:

gcc -O2 -Wall -lm -o techno-gen techno-gen.c

Play

Pipe directly into paplay (PulseAudio):

./techno-gen | paplay --format=float32le --rate=44100 --channels=2

Note: paplay is part of the pulseaudio-utils package. On Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install pulseaudio-utils

Mono version (if you only want 1 channel)

The program outputs stereo (2 channels). If you want mono, mix down with sox:

./techno-gen | sox -t raw -r 44100 -e float -b 32 -c 2 - -t raw -r 44100 -e float -b 32 -c 1 - | paplay --format=float32le --rate=44100 --channels=1

Record to file

./techno-gen | sox -t raw -r 44100 -e float -b 32 -c 2 - output.wav trim 0 120

This records 2 minutes (trim 0 120) to output.wav.

What it sounds like

Time	Section
0–3 bars	Intro — kick + bass, filter closed
4–7 bars	Rise — hi-hats join, filter opens
8–15 bars	Full — snare, acid lead, LFO filter sweeps
16–19 bars	Breakdown — bass only, stripped down
20–23 bars	Build — kick returns, filter climbs
24–31 bars	Heavy — syncopated kick, acid variation 2
then loops	Back to bar 8 (never the sparse intro again)

The cycle is 32 bars (~1 min 23 sec at 138 BPM), then repeats with continuous filter and pattern variation.

Synthesis

All audio is synthesized in real time:

• Kick — sine oscillator with pitch envelope (200 → 45 Hz), amp decay, transient click
• Snare — high-pass filtered noise blended with a 185 Hz tone
• Hi-hat — noise through a 7 kHz high-pass; open/closed variants with different decay times
• Bass — sawtooth oscillator through a resonant (Q=4.5) biquad low-pass with per-note filter envelope and glide
• Acid lead — dual slightly-detuned sawtooth through a very resonant (Q=6) low-pass; filter sweeps with LFO per section
• Stereo width — short delay line (~11 ms) ping-ponged between channels on hats and acid
• Master — tanh soft saturation to keep levels honest