Introduction

The Waves program is a program, written in the Harbour implementation of the Clipper language, to emit the sound of ocean waves from the speakers. It works by raising and lowering the audio volume at intervals resembling incoming waves at night. It uses Linux' play command to play brown noise, which gets louder and softer like incoming waves at night.

It was created and tested on a Linux computer with ALSA and no Pulseaudio, Jack or Pipewire. It requires a Harbour 3.2 (later will probably also work) compiler, and a program to emit brown noise from the speakers. It's currently set to use the Linux play command for the brown noise. I'm pretty sure that the program will need some modification to run and achieve the most pleasing wave noise, and it will certainly require modification to run on Windows.

I modeled the sound after the sound of incoming waves on Venice Beach, California, late at night. It's a beautiful and restful sound.

Installation

Here's how you install it on Linux:

1. Choose or create a directory below which to put the waves directory.
2. Download the package as a .zip or .tgz from here, into that directory.
3. Extract the .tar or .zip to create the waves directory
4. cd waves
5. Run thecompile.sh script.
6. Run the waves.sh script. It might play steady brown noise, but most likely won't raise and lower the volume.
7. Within the waves.prg program, change the local variables at the top of the main() procedure, then run compile.sh and waves.sh.
8. Repeat the preceding step until the proper ingoing and outgoing wave sound is heard.