I want to be able to define and play melodies

[ntoll]

As a musician, I want to be able to create melodic parts as collections of notes. May I suggest the music DSL we made for the micro:bit as a starting point..? https://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/v1.0.1/music.html

In addition to the named notes (e.g. "c1:4") I want to be able to perhaps describe specific pitches by cycles, e.g. "440:4" for a concert A (440) for a "crotchet's" value of duration. Obviously, I'm using a string based representation for those latter values, and these could just be a tuple like this: (440, 4).

[lordmauve]

I think the problem for this is that pyfxr is not a player and it can't really be, across all use case. Pygame doesn't have a built in event loop - it isn't a game engine - so you can't just schedule notes to play at a moment in time. The user has to be involved in playing notes at the relevant moment; the best we could do is provide the timing data and SoundBuffer objects in a way where it can be integrated with a couple of lines of code.

As a standalone library, pyfxr could mix a sequence of notes and produce a longer sound sequence - but that would be quite expensive, and not really appropriate in the context of a game.

However, playing melodies would be easily achievable as a feature of Pygame Zero, because that is a game engine, and does have a clock that would let you schedule notes for a moment in time.

[ntoll]

Hmm... I'm not sure I quite get the subtle difference between PyGame not being a game engine and PyGameZero actually being one. Something for us to discuss in future I guess, in terms of implementation details.

Putting that aside, if folks want to define a melody, I think my suggestion still stands for a melody DSL.