Musical Creativity with Python

Recently, I found that there were gaps in the musical creativity packages on pypi. There are packages for music analysis and utilities for doing MIDI things, but nothing I could find for actual creativity. I decided to rectify this and port my music and MIDI Perl code to Python.

First up was my rhythmic phrase generator that is essential for doing things other than steady, even beats. That ended up as https://pypi.org/project/random-rhythms/.

Second was my handy MIDI drummer. This makes it a no-brainer to add beats to a piece. This ended up as https://pypi.org/project/music-drummer/.

Third was my Creating Rhythms module, based on the excellent book by Hollos and Hollos. This allows for the creation of combinatorical patterns that can be used for note rhythms or beats (e.g.euclid(m, n) for instance). This became https://pypi.org/project/music-creatingrhythms/.

After porting my rhythmic modules over, I turned to tonal things.

So fourth was the fabulous module https://metacpan.org/pod/Music::VoiceGen by Jeremy Mates which I heavily depend upon for my stuff. That ended up as https://pypi.org/project/music-voicegen/.

Fifth was then my bassline generator code. What would music be without a low-end? Haha! That ended up as https://pypi.org/project/music-bassline-generator/.

Sixth was probably the most nerdy of all chord changes - https://metacpan.org/dist/Music-Chord-Progression-Transform - my module for doing neo-Riemannian chord progressions. This code also depends on another module that I ported by Jeremy Mates: https://metacpan.org/pod/Music::NeoRiemannianTonnetz. This ended up as https://pypi.org/project/music-tonnetztransform/.

Seventh were my modules for converting notes and phrases with traditional types of chromatic and melodic transformations, like inversion, ornaments, and arpeggiation, etc. They became https://pypi.org/project/music-melodicdevice/.

Eighth was my module for creating randomized chord progressions based on weighted network transitions (from one chord to the next). This ended up as https://pypi.org/project/chord-progression-network/.

I made simple musical examples and added them to the readme files for each package.

For my musical curiosities, I made a few threading real-time MIDI players, one of which is: https://github.com/ology/Music/blob/master/midi-thread-2.py that exercises the arpeggiation device.

This is musically realized (and is extremely long) here:

For this example, I grabbed the name of the MIDI port and executed python midi-thread-2.py 'USB MIDI Interface'

This open-source code can be copied and modified with any of the above packages for your own player.

Enjoy! :D