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!

Basic Math Concepts made Complicated Quickly

Fibonacci - What’s in a Name…

The man, the myth

Leonardo Fibonacci was a mathematician who lived in the middle ages and was held in high esteem for his prowess as a talented mathematician. Best known for his Fibonacci Sequence which seemingly is simple to define, yet it’s limit point (of the ratio of the last two elements of the sequence) (also known as the Greek letter Phi). The mysticism around the Golden ratio abounds due to its correlation with many natural element - both living things as well as dynamic processes.

Teaching Python to Beginners.

Teaching Python to a total noob

How hard can it be!

Recently, I had the pleasure of becoming a tutor for someone needing to learn how to program for the very first time. Having been a programmer for over four decades (OAF), I was quickly reminded of how much accumulated knowledge we who are in the know take for granted. Although my knowledge of computer science, and programming languages in general is extensive, I used the occasion to revisit aspects of the python language that are less obvious to a novice.

Welcome to Cyberspy

Well hello there!

Welcome to cyberspy. I look forward to sharing lots of cool stuff about programming, music, wine, and other things from time to time that I find interesting.

I have a short attention span, so many of these posts aim to be succinct and informative rather than long-winded rants that no one wants to read (nor I want to write).

– enjoy!