I’ve tried to procedurally generate music from scratch a few times in other languages over the years, but since this is a “couch project” I spent a couple minutes searching for NPM libraries and settled on ScribbleTune.
ScribbleTune
ScribbleTune provides an elegant API for declaratively generating midi, I’m only scratching the surface of the capabilities in this video. I basically just run through the examples to see how they work, and ended up sticking with the chord/rhythm generation and tweaking it.
Initially, I thought I would create a website to play the file but once I opened a file in Garage Band I realized that I might actually use this thing. Throughout this video you’ll hear me playing around a bit with the file, changing instruments, editing the file, etc
Tracery
Next, I used Tracery that I had seen in a GDC talk, and have been dying to try out. I hadn’t worked with it before, but in short it allows you to declaratively define a grammar, which will recursively fill in any tokens you setup. It’s really elegant and easy to use, people use it for all sorts of things: Twitter bots, images, game content, etc
Side note, if you’ve got an open-source library and you actually want people to use it. Examples, examples, examples
After I got my libraries working I just need to clean-up the data a little bit so the music I’m generating doesn’t sound so terrible. I don’t know a lot about music theory, so I just divided the chords in the Am/C scale (aka the white notes on the piano) into sad, happy, and sassy. Then I ask for a random chord.
I also created a second grammar for rhythm so things don’t sound so same-y.
Where do we go from here?
- Create more grammars, things like verse, chorus, bridge
- Experiment with more complex rhythm
- Generate melodies and drum parts
- Hook up a web player and make a little app to practice your favorite
