27 Dec
2025
27 Dec
'25
5:50 p.m.
On Friday, December 26th, 2025 at 19:39, david <gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
I've considered finding various ways to combine
pi, e (natural logarithm) and other irrational mathematical numbers into music. Right now,
it's all manual. But if it could be done programmatically, it might be more fun. At
least faster.
(...)
Any advice?
If by "combining numbers into music" you mean obtaining symbolic representation
of music (i.e. score that you will give to musicians, MIDI, etc.), Python might be a
low-hanging fruit. There are many modules for all kinds of scientific computing and
visualization, Music21 is made for handling musical structures on any level and can export
to MIDI, MusicXML, Lilypond, and probably other formats. The language is "easy"
to learn and there are tons of resources for learning and growing. You could probably even
do the maths in a spreadsheet of your choice and use Python + Music21 only to convert your
CSV file to a score.
For explorations on the level of sound synthesis or DSP, you'll probably want to look
into SuperCollider, FAUST or CSound, the choice will be hard to make. Nyquist (Lisp
syntax) is part of Audacity, so that might be one possible path.
Postscript (yes, it is a full Turing-complete
language!),
So is PowerPoint :P
Cheers,
Michał