raspi_buzzer_player

Play 121 melodies on your Raspberry Pi with a cheap passive (or active) buzzer — game and movie themes, classical pieces, Christmas carols, folk songs and nursery rhymes. Pure Python 3, no dependencies beyond RPi.GPIO.

Repository: https://github.com/gumslone/raspi_buzzer_player

Features

• 121 built-in songs across many genres — run --list to browse them.
• Tiny command line — play everything, a single song, or a custom set, selected by number or by title (substring match).
• Compact song notation so adding a new tune is a single line of text.
• No third-party dependencies beyond RPi.GPIO (preinstalled on Raspberry Pi OS); square-wave tone generation is done in pure Python.
• Clean shutdown — the GPIO pin is always released, even on Ctrl+C.

Hardware

A passive or active buzzer wired to a GPIO pin:

Passive buzzer        Pi
   VCC --------------- 3.3V
   GND --------------- GND
   SIG --------------- GPIO27   (BCM numbering)

The signal pin is configured in buzzer_player.py:

buzzer_pin = 27   # BCM pin number

Change that value if your buzzer is on a different pin.

Requirements

• A Raspberry Pi running Raspberry Pi OS (or any Linux with RPi.GPIO).
• Python 3.
• The RPi.GPIO library (shipped with Raspberry Pi OS; otherwise pip install RPi.GPIO).

Usage

python3 buzzer_player.py             # play every song in order
python3 buzzer_player.py --list      # list all songs with their numbers
python3 buzzer_player.py 9           # play one song by number
python3 buzzer_player.py mario       # play by title (substring match)
python3 buzzer_player.py 9 star bond # play several songs in sequence
python3 buzzer_player.py --help      # full option list

Song selection by title is a case-insensitive substring match, so python3 buzzer_player.py zelda plays Zelda's Lullaby. Press Ctrl+C at any time to stop; the buzzer pin is released cleanly on exit.

How it works

The project is split into two files:

File	Responsibility
songs.py	The note table and the song library. No GPIO import, so it can be imported and inspected on any machine.
buzzer_player.py	GPIO setup, tone generation, playback loop and the command-line interface.

A passive buzzer makes sound when its pin is toggled on and off quickly. To play a note, buzz() toggles buzzer_pin high then low for half the note's period, repeated for the note's duration — generating a square wave at the target frequency. A frequency of 0 is treated as a rest (silence). Each song is a melody list of frequencies paired with an equal-length tempo list of note durations, plus pause (gap between notes) and pace (overall speed) parameters.

The notes table maps note names (C4, FS5, BB3, …) to their frequency in Hz, covering 103 pitches from B0 (31 Hz) to DS8 (4978 Hz).

Adding songs

New songs use a compact notation: whitespace-separated NOTE:DURATION tokens.

• NOTE is a key of the notes table (e.g. C5, FS4, BB3), or R for a rest.
• DURATION is the tempo divisor: 1 = whole, 2 = half, 4 = quarter, 8 = eighth, 16 = sixteenth. It is optional and defaults to 4.

Add a (title, notation) entry to the SIMPLE_SONGS list in songs.py:

("My Song", "C5 C5 G5 G5 A5 A5 G5:2 F5 F5 E5 E5 D5 D5 C5:2"),

It is picked up automatically by the command line — no other changes needed. Note that the bundled melodies are simplified single-voice arrangements transcribed by ear and tuned for a buzzer, so they are meant to be recognisable rather than note-perfect scores.

Project layout

buzzer_player.py   GPIO playback + command-line interface
songs.py           note table and 121-song library
README.md          this file
LICENSE            The Unlicense (public domain)

Credits

Some of the note data for the melodies originated from astlessons.com.

License

Released into the public domain under The Unlicense.