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MusicalPlaying.jl

MusicalPlaying is my Julia package for playing (with) music.

It grew out of TuningSystems.jl presented on JuliaCon2024 to have a more complete and better structured package. It has some overlap with MusicTheory.jl and MIDI.jl from JuliaMusic. In time, this may be resolved, but for now, I focus on writing the package, as I find most logical.

I plan to cover:

  • [X] Playing simple notes, chords and melodies.
  • [ ] Explore different Tuning Systems, in particular Just Intonation
  • [ ] Represent Scores of several voices
  • [ ] Use DataFrames to view Scores as in a Tracker
  • [ ] Plot notes, chords and scores in an "isometric" form more natural that the classical scores
  • [ ] Possibly generate traditional Piano-roll plots
  • [ ] Define basic types to represent note, tone, sound
  • [ ] Explore sound synthesis
  • [ ] Act as a very simple MIDI player
  • [ ] Parse (simple) Lilypond syntax

On the synthesis side, I want to keep working on functions as long as possible, and only sample just before rendering to WAV.

Basic Data Types

The basic data sctructures are similar, but different from both MIDI.jl and MusicTheory.jl.

Note

The Note data type descries an abstract note, as we see in a score:

  • The "pictch": note height. An integer between 0 and 127 as the MIDI note. Not directly a frequency, we get that through the "TunigSystem".
  • The "loudness": relative volume. Not directly amplitude. That comes in a mastering step just before sampling. Defaults to 1. Perhaps "forte" is 2 and "piano" as 0.5.
  • The "duration": relative note length. 1 is a "beat", so a duration of 1 sounds for 1 sec if the tempo is 60 bpm. Typically, a auarter note has a dutration of 1, and a half note a duration of 2.

Chord

a Chord is a sequence (Vector) of Notes with the same duration (but possibly different loudness) that are played together at the same time.

AbstractNote

Note and Chord are the instances of AbstractNote.

Melody

A Melody is a sequence (Vector) of Notes and Chords that are played in succession.

Tone

The tone combines a Note or Chrod with a Tuning to assign frequency to the pitch. This was the objective of TuningSystems.jl.

The slots of Tone are

  • frequency: The frequency in Hz.
  • note: remember the AbstractNote this comes from
  • tuning: remember the Tuning used

Sound

A sound is a function that can be sampled.