How can I generate precise microtonal tones in Python?

Real-time audio is where plain Python can become unreliable because of timing and latency. For basic playback or file generation it should be fine, but for a more demanding live instrument you may want an audio-focused tool or another language such as C#. MIDI is also a reasonable option if your synthesizer supports pitch bend or fine detuning.

For offline audio, NumPy can generate a sine wave at any exact frequency, and a library such as soundfile can write the resulting samples to a WAV file. That gives you direct control over the frequency in hertz and avoids MIDI’s pitch-resolution limits.

You can also generate the audio with an external command-line tool and invoke it from Python. That approach is useful when you want reliable file conversion or playback, but NumPy plus a WAV-writing library is probably the simplest solution for producing exact-frequency test tones.

If you need to play the tone directly, simpleaudio can accept a NumPy array containing the generated samples. You can calculate the waveform at any frequency and send it straight to the audio buffer, which works well for simple microtonal tones.