Maestro Cue the Music!

Now it’s time to get conducting.

We’ve learned all about L-systems, midi magic, tools like MISEP that generates musical patterns. Now we can take it all together and generate some algorithmically inspired music!

To do this, I’mg going to reach for the isobar kit I mentioned in the first post. Rather than spend time writing the tedious algorithms to perform the mappings, this fine python library offers a rich collection of algorithmic generators and mappings - for chromatic, velocity, and rhythmic elements.

Listen to my MISPELling

expremigen - a lesson in MISPEL

Expremigen is an expressive midi generation library written in python by shimpe. It’s an exceptional tool to create musical compositions which can be rendered into MIDI and played out to an audio device.

In this post, we’re going to cover how to setup your OSX-based computer to play a midi file and then dive into using the python library, expremigen and it’s MIDI Specification Language (MISPEL) to generate some midi compositions.

Generating Music with Formal Grammars

What’s your Grammar Know about Music?

Well, not your Grandma, but grammar, a field of computer science that formalizes language theory. For those unfamiliar with the topic, it’s a bit similar to the grammar lessons that tortured you in grade school, except with a twist of math!

Why do we care about grammars when we are contemplating generating music algorithmically? It turns out using a special type of generative grammar known as an L-system is a great way to programmatically create our compositions. In the last post, one of the academic papers discussed this technique. Here, I’ll summarize some of that discussion and develop examples which we can use for our compositions.

Experimenting with Programatically-Generated (Sheet) Music

Music Math Mashup - A Multi-part Series on Music, Math, and Programming

Today, I thought I’d experiment with smashing music and software together - let’s take a look at different algorithms and tools that allows us to experiment with the generation of music, along with the visualization, and performance of our generated scores. There’s a lot here, and we’re going to tackle it in multiple blog posts, so don’t get overwhelmed thinking about all of it at once!