musicpy

Musicpy is a music programming language implemented as a Python library. Its goal is to let users write music with a concise, human-readable syntax built on music theory and algorithms, and it is fully compatible with Python, so ordinary Python code can interact with it. Core capabilities - Represent notes, chords, melodies, rhythms and volumes with compact syntax. - Perform music-theory operations and design algorithmic composition logic. - Export musicpy structures to MIDI files, and load MIDI files back into musicpy data structures for further processing. - Read and write MusicXML files when the optional musicxml dependencies are installed. - Play music directly, with a play function that can block until playback finishes via wait=True. - Include a daw module (optional dependencies) for working with soundfonts. Data structures - note, chord and scale are the basic classes. - The note class is congruent to integers and can be used as an int. - The chord class behaves like a set of notes, and can be treated as a set of integers, a vector, or a matrix when chord progressions are combined. - These classes support arithmetic use, which the author connects to linear algebra and discrete mathematics, and to experimental styles such as serialism, aleatoric and minimalist music. Installation and platform notes - Requires Python 3.7 or newer; install with pip install musicpy. - Optional extras: pip install musicpy[musicxml], pip install musicpy[daw], or both together. - Works on Windows, macOS and Linux. - On Linux, pygame must be older than 2.0.3 for the play function to work correctly, and freepats is needed (for example sudo apt-get install freepats on Ubuntu). - If no sound is heard, setting wait=True in play can help because some IDEs do not wait for playback. - On Linux or macOS, the daw module dependency sf2_loader requires extra configuration steps. Documentation and tooling - Detailed tutorials are in the project wiki and on Read the Docs; the wiki is updated alongside new releases. - A PDF and Markdown copy of the wiki is offered for download. - A separate musicpy_editor project provides an editor with real-time compilation and execution and some syntactic sugar. Example A short example shows a nylon-string guitar playing broken chords over a progression, built from chord expressions combined with operators and then passed to play with a bpm and instrument number. Background The author began developing musicpy in October 2019 and continues to update it frequently. A stated motivation is to represent how music is constructed from a music-theory perspective rather than only storing notes and tempo, and to give composing AI a music-theory interface instead of relying solely on deep learning and large datasets. The README also notes that familiarity with basic music theory is recommended for effective use.