How to generate pleasant sound?

[minghia]

Hi everyone,

I've been experimenting with various piezo's and buzzers from Digikey for my PIC project but could not find or generate anything that is pleasing to the ear or to my liking.

What I want to emit is a sound similar to what comes out of a cordless phone, or a mobile phone. I don't want it to be a ring, or song, or anything annoying like an alarm beep and I don't need a voice chip or anything like that. I want something like a chime, something you would hear at a subway terminal or airport just before an announcement message. I want the component count, size and price to be as small as possible as well.

Does anybody have any suggestions or have done this in the past? The sound I need to create should be as loud as a cordless phone's medium/high setting (got 24V to work with, and about 500ma). I've been googling and came up with small 8 ohm speakers but not sure if a) these would be loud enough, I can get it to sound like a cordless phone warble type sound, and c) if PICBasic is able to generate the tone for me.

Thanks for any help and suggestions.

 

[blueroomelectronics]

Mobile phones play ringtones, it's ususally a form of MP3. As for PICBasic hard to say, perhaps if you put it out over the HW PWM channel.
Google Roman Black and his 1.5 bit sound, that should be good enough for a pleasant sound generator.

 

[kdittyr]

Look half way down the page (Creating a Sine Wave with a PIC16F84):

Not sure if that will help, but you could also record a pleasing sound and view the sound wave in software, then try to re-create it with a pic...

 

[ikalogic]

Hi everyone,

I've been experimenting with various piezo's and buzzers from Digikey for my PIC project but could not find or generate anything that is pleasing to the ear or to my liking.

Thanks for any help and suggestions.

try to output sine waves, with a simple R/2R dac, instead of simple square waves.. this will dramatically enhace your sound's quality

 

[ClydeCrashKop]

Radio Shack has a piezo chime that does a pleasant ding dong, ding dong door bell sound. 6 to 24 volts.

 

[Hero999]

You could try an analogue solution, there are two ways I can think of:

Create an RC oscillator with not quite enough gain to oscillate and it'll ring when a pulse is applied to the biasing network.

Create a tuned circuit from a gyrator circuit and a capacitor and it'll ring when a pulse is applied to it.

 

[Hank Fletcher]

24V to work with, and about 500ma

That's enough power to operate a magnetic coil for the clapper to a real bell (although probably not enough current for a standard door bell off the shelf at your local hardware store). I use to have science kit that did this:
**broken link removed**
If you find something that dongs with a pleasant sound, it'd be cheap enough to build the clapper portion.