Exercise Sounds with SuperCollider

Imagine you are instructing a group of athletes doing circuit training. The circuit training consists of stress and relaxation phases, which will be repeated in multiple series. At the end of a series there is usually a longer relaxation phase ('Serienpause').

To determine beginning and end of the individual phases, it is straight forward to use a stopwatch. However, the stopwatch will draw away most of your attention and you will not be able to correct the athletes any longer. Therefore, an acoustic signal is desirable that indicates the individual phases. The waveform of the signal might look as shown below:

The pulses indicate the seconds during the stress phase and the noisy parts mark the relaxation phase.

Such an audio signal can be synthesized using a software synthesizer, eg. SuperCollider. An exemplary audio file that was created with SuperCollider can be listened to here. It consists of 3 series with 2 stress phases (30s), a relaxation phase (20s) and a longer relaxation phase at the end of the series (30s).

The SuperCollider code, that was used to generate the audio file, can be downloaded here. It can be easily adapted to account for other durations of the individual phases.