Music

Music is a python package to generate and manipulate music and sounds. It's written using the MASS (Music and Audio in Sample Sequences) framework, a collection of psychophysical descriptions of musical elements in LPCM audio through equations and corresponding Python routines.

To have a further understanding of the routines you can read the article Musical elements in the discrete-time representation of sound.

If you use this package, please cite the forementioned article.

Core features

The precision of Music makes it the perfect choice for many scientific uses. At its core there are a few important features:

• Sample-based synth, meaning that the state is updated at each sample. For example, when we have a note with a vibrato, each sample is associated to a different frequency. By doing this the synthesized sound is the closest it can be to the mathematical model that describes it.
• Musical structures with emphasis in symmetry and discourse.

Music can be used alone or with other packages, and it's ideal for audiovisualization of data. For example, it can be used with Percolation and Participation for harnessing open linked social data, or with audiovisual analytics vocabulary and ontology (AAVO).

How to install

To install music you can either install it directly with pip:

pip3 install music

or you can clone this repository and install it from there:

git clone https://github.com/ttm/music.git
pip3 install -e <path_to_repo>

This install method is especially useful when reloading the modified module in subsequent runs of music, and for greater control of customization, hacking and debugging.

Dependencies

Every dependency is installed by default by pip, but you can take a look at requirements.txt.

Examples

Inside the examples folder you can find some scripts that use the main features of Music.

• chromatic_scale: writes twelve notes into a WAV file from a sequence of frequencies.
• penta_effects: writes a pentatonic scale repeated once clean, once with pitch, one with vibrato, one with Doppler, and one with FM, into a WAV stereo file.
• noisy: writes into a WAV file a sequence of different noises.
• thirty_notes and thirty_numpy_notes generate a sequence of sounds by using a synth class (in this case the class Being).
• campanology and geometric_music both use Being as their synth, but this time with permutations.
• isynth also uses a synth class, but of a different kind, IteratorSynth, that iterates through arbitrary lists of variables.

Package structure

The modules are:

• core:
  • synths for synthesization of notes (including vibratos, glissandos, etc.), noises and envelopes.
  • filters for the application of filters such as ADSR envelopes, fades, IIR and FIR, reverb, loudness, and localization.
  • io for reading and writing WAV files, both mono and stereo.
  • functions for normalization.
• structures for higher level musical structures such as permutations (and related to algebraic groups and change ringing peals), scales, chords, counterpoint, tunings, etc.
• legacy for musical pieces that are rendered with the Music package and might be used as material to make more music.
• tables for the generation of lookup tables for some basic waveform.
• utils for various functions regarding conversions, mix, etc.

Roadmap

Music is stable but still very young. We didn't have the opportunity yet to make Music all we want it to be.

Here is one example of what we're aiming at:

import music

music.render_demos() # render some wav files in ./

music.legacy.experiments.cristal2(.2, 300) # wav of sonic structure in ./

sound_waves = music.legacy.songs.madame_z(render=False) # return numpy array

sound_waves2 = music.core.io.open("demosong2.wav") # numpy array

music = music.remix(sound_waves, soundwaves2)
music_ = music.horizontal_stack(sound_waves[:44100*2], music[len(music)/2::2])

music.core.io.write_wav_mono(music_)

Coding conventions

The code follows PEP 8 conventions.

For a better understanding of each function, the math behind it and see examples of their use, you can read their docstring.

Further information

Music is primarily intended for artistic use, but was also designed to run psychophysics experiments and data sonification.

You can find an example in Versinus, an animated visualization method for evolving networks that uses Music to render the musical track that represents networks structures.

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