Real time audio matlab. Loop while answering to gui calls - matlab

Question

I'm doing a simple GUI in matlab using guide, where I have some sliders to select a frequency or many which then get plotted and played through the speakers. I'm learning real-time sound right now so I thought it'd be neat to incorporate it into the application. I right now have a button that plays the sinusoidal waves for 10 seconds when I press it, but I want a checkbox that disables the button when checked and immediately starts playing the sound continuously until the checkbutton is unchecked again.
I can't really get my head around how to do this in Matlab since I heard Matlab is inherently single threaded. And how to do it right with the GUI and everything since I suspect GUI creation is something you think you do right, but you miss some kind of detail and it only works in some situations.
What I think would be the easy way would be to have the check of the checkbox set the 'Enable' property of the Play button to false, and start an infinite loop that plays it from the real time system object I create. When I however uncheck the checkbox, it should set a flag or something to false and enable the Play button again. Could someone point me to if this is the right approach? How do I make the application listen to clicks on the check box while simultanously being in an infinite loop that processes and plays sound? The simultanous loop should be sensitive to changes in the sliders determining the frequencies and those frequencies are also stored in the handles variable.
Mockup code:
function playbutton_Callback(hObject, eventdata, handles)
freqs = [handles.freq1, handles.freq2, handles.freq3]
hightensecy = sinewave(handles.hightensecx, freqs); %creates a sinewave consisting of the three frequencies. hightensecx is a time vector of ten seconds with a high sample rate.
sound(hightensecy, handles.highsr);
figure;
plot(handles.hightensecx,hightensecy);
function y = sinewave(x, freqs)
% x in sec
y(:,1:size(freqs,2)) = sin(2*pi*x*freqs);
y=sum(y,2)/size(freqs,2);
end
% --- Other code to make the sliders store their values in handles.freq1, handles.freq2... ---
function continuousbox_Callback(hObject, eventdata, handles)
selected = get(hObject,'Value');
if(selected)
set(handles.playbutton, 'Enable', 'off');
startsound(handles);
else
set(handles.playbutton, 'Enable', 'on');
stopsound();
end
% Plays sound continuously
function startsound(handles)
%%Initialization
SamplesPerFrame = 1024;
Fs = handles.highsr;
Player = dsp.AudioPlayer('SampleRate', Fs);
%%Stream
tic
while(1)
%TODO Read in a new 1024 bytes chunk and make sure it has the same
%characteristics as sinewave(x, freqs)
step(Player, outsound)
end
%Stops the continuously played sound
function stopsound()
%TODO Somehow stop the loop inside startsound(handles)
If it is possible, it would be good if the resulting startsound function plays a sound that sounds exactly like the playbutton callback, only indefinitely. I'm also not sure how to handle phase issues that might occur in the real time loop. Should I use a time counter that tics away and calculates the current 1024 chunk's y-value and in that case, should I just use the time distance from tic, or increase it with 1024/sample rate seconds per time? Thanks in advance.