I have a Sound Blaster 16 PCI sound card (new) and I would like to use
it-- without a computer-- to function as a tone generator when hooked
up to speakers.  I'd like it to play various notes, depending on the
signal I send to it (from a keyboard, for example).  Can you help me
find documentation for building such a device?  Thank you!

A regular tone generator/ electronic tuner from a music shop would
probably cost much less and be easier to use.  The PCI card won't
function without commands along the bus.  Those commands will need to
come from somewhere (usually a computer).  At the very least you're
talking about hooking up extra chips and wires, and soldering to be
able to control the card.

A much, much simpler solution is that an analog tone generator can be
built from kit parts at little cost.  No need for all the fancy memory
/ wave tables / A-to-D / sound synthesis that the PC card is capable
of. (The difficulty here is that you're trying to take a complex PC
card to do a very simple task.)

Regards,
duncan2-ga

Hello duncan2,
Thank you for your comments.  I would like to do this because of the
challenge, but I just don't know where to start.  I am willing to go
out of my way for the extra parts.  Yes, I know it's overdoing it a
bit, but it's something I'd like to try.

Hasn't anyone tried making sounds (wavetable synthesis is desired,
actually) from a sound card without a computer?

Thanks again!

Basically, you'd have to emulate a computer. The uh, "easiest" way to
do it without just buying some dumpy old computer to plug it into
would be to buy a PCI slot connector, a south bridge chip of some
sort, and a pretty hefty circuit board.. you'd have to find a way to
put a very low-level driver (i would recommend checking open source
drivers for the board for some direction here, but I'm not a
programmer, I'm not sure how difficult this part would be) into an
embedded controller of some sort, with the driver modified to accept
an input from a keyboard signal (you'd need the appropriate connector
to do this as well; I'm not sure if you mean a MIDI keyboard or a
computer keyboard.)

The idea here is *extremely* complex; to be honest, it would be
cheaper to pick up a broken down 486 with PCI slots from Goodwill,
install Linux or something on it, and write (or find) an application
that will simply translate keyboard input to the sound card's onboard
wavetable output...it would still be clumsy at best without any GUI,
unless your keyboard has thousands of keys. :) Even USING a computer,
if you left out a number of generally important components, you could
make this project quite complicated. :)

-brightshadow

Thank you both for your suggestions.  I appreciate your taking the
time to give me feedback.