sebastian 0.0.1

symbolic music analysis and composition library in Python

Sebastian will be a symbolic music analysis and composition library written in Python.

I partly think of it as being a “Mathematica for music”. By symbolic, I mean that it will focus more on the sorts of abstractions made by music notation and theories of harmony and counterpoint than lower level numerical operations that one might use in, say, music synthesis.

I hope it to be very practical as an analysis tool for existing compositions (especially from the common practice period) and also a tool for computer-assisted composition. It will also be a bit of a test bed for ideas I’ve had for a while around applying linguistics and abstract algebra to music.

As an initial driver for this attempt at building Sebastian, I’m going to start by writing software for generating a performance of Terry Riley’s In C. This will provide a nice little project by which to motivate finishing off my MIDI library, write a parser for lilypond as I’d like to define the In C patterns (and indeed much in Sebastian) in that notation.

James Tauber [e-mail]