Using music21 for music manipulation?

[Henry Franks]

Magenta is a very exciting project! I've played a lot with algorithmic composition and it's amazing to see an organisation like google get involved. 

Have you considered using music21 as a library for manipulating music in the system? It feels like writing your own midi manipulation modules is re-inventing the wheel a little -- music21 is a fully-featured manipulation library with built-in support for transforming music between pretty much any digital format that exists. I've tried out most music/composition libraries out there and none are as impressive as this -- it feels like building on top of their work would be a great step forward.

[Cinjon Resnick]

Hi there Henry,

We're using pretty_midi developed by Colin Raffel for our primary MIDI handling. Most of our tools operate with protobufs, so our own manipulation is towards utilizing that format.

However, if you'd like to build an interface for Magenta to utilize music21, the community would definitely appreciate it.

- Cinjon (Magenta)

On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 3:50 AM, 'Henry Franks' via Magenta Discuss <magenta...@tensorflow.org> wrote:

Magenta is a very exciting project! I've played a lot with algorithmic composition and it's amazing to see an organisation like google get involved. 

Have you considered using music21 as a library for manipulating music in the system? It feels like writing your own midi manipulation modules is re-inventing the wheel a little -- music21 is a fully-featured manipulation library with built-in support for transforming music between pretty much any digital format that exists. I've tried out most music/composition libraries out there and none are as impressive as this -- it feels like building on top of their work would be a great step forward.

--
Magenta project: magenta.tensorflow.org
To post to this group, send email to magenta...@tensorflow.org
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to magenta-discu...@tensorflow.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Magenta Discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to magenta-discu...@tensorflow.org.

[Adam Roberts]

Hi Henry,

Thanks for the pointer! We love hearing about any existing tools are available. 

While we are focused on doing manipulations on our protobufs, which are easy to deal with than midi files, there are certainly ways we can interface with existing libraries. As Cinjon said, feel free to add hooks into midi21 as you see fit and file pull requests if they are useful. If we see something we would like to use in that or other libraries, we will likely take the same approach.

-Adam

[Henry Franks]

Thanks both -- When I get a moment, I would certainly like to add in some music21 hooks. I can then also contribute a significant library of stuff that might be helpful -- analysis code, manipulation code, and loading from other targets (I've found guitar pro tabs to be a great source of machine readable contemporary music, and have a converter to music21 for this).

Do you have any guidelines for contributions ? I've not contributed to an open source project before!

[Douglas Eck]

There's someone at google who is also interested in music21. I pointed him to this thread so he may chime in later. 

My main concern here is to avoid chaos. We need to think carefully about how to organize the magenta github so that we can 

support linking to other tools. Ideally we'd have a very simple core set of protos (as in the current music.proto) and allow for

all sorts of project-specific extensions that don't get in the way.