Integrating PyAudio & PySimpleGUI

Blocking and non blocking operations in python

Intro

As part of my research on Signal Processing and AI, I wanted to visually represent real time audio data from my microphone, this simple request turned out to be not so simple at all for a number of reasons we will cover, along the way we will see how to integrate PyAudio with a GUI (I use PySimpleGUI but you can modify the code for your UI of choice), and talk a bit about blocking and non blocking operations in Python.

Your time is valuable, I get it. If you just want to copy pasta 🍝some code to integrate PyAudio/PySimpleGUI you are looking for the last code example, there's also a repo with the code samples:
https://github.com/KenoLeon/PySimpleGUI-PyAudio

Spec

As mentioned all I want is a little widget box that allows me to capture the sound from my microphone and display it in a window, something like this:

PyAudio

I am using PyAudio because at this time it seems the library of choice for dealing with audio in Python, the documentation is a bit sparse though:

PyAudio Documentation - PyAudio 0.2.11 documentation

You can read it in a couple of minutes and the 2 lonely examples they provide are the basis for further code, so if you understand them you are golden and might wish to jump to the integration part.

To start things off here’s a crude blocking stream that won’t quit until you terminate the script, usually with ctrl+c:

We can see the sound levels via the terminal (I am using…