Tuesday 11 June 2013
What's mingus?
Intervals, Chords, Scales and Progressions
mingus is a package for Python used by programmers, musicians, composers and researchers to make and investigate music. At the core of mingus is music theory, which includes topics like intervals, chords, scales and progressions. These components are rigorously tested and can be used to generate and recognize musical elements using convenient shorthand where possible (for example some acceptable chords are: "CM7", "Am6", "Ab7", "G7").
Bars, Tracks and Compositions
On top of the core are data structures (mingus.containers) that make it easier to work with notes in bars, tracks and compositions. These containers lay the foundation for the remaining packages: midi and extra.
MIDI and Sequencing
The MIDI package can save and load MIDI files, and -last but not least- provides a general purpose sequencer for all the containers and a FluidSynth sequencer subclass. This allows you to play all your data structures straight from Python in just a couple of lines. Most of the icky timing and MIDI code has been abstracted away for you, leaving a clean, relatively simple API.
Extra
Lastly, the extra package includes a LilyPond exporter which can be used to create sheet music in PDF, PNG and postscript. It also offers ASCII tablature and MusicXML exporting and a sound analysis module which can recognize notes and melody in raw audio data.
