mingus
What's mingus?
Intervals, Chords, Scales and Progressions
mingus is a package for Python used by programmers, musicians, composers and researchers to make and investigate music. At the core of mingus is music theory, which includes topics like intervals, chords, scales and progressions. These components are rigurously tested and can be used to generate and recognize musical elements using convenient shorthand where possible (for example some acceptable chords are: "CM7", "Am6", "Ab7", "G7").
Bars, Tracks and Compositions
On top of the core are data structures (mingus.containers) that make it easier to work with notes in bars, tracks and compositions. These containers lay the foundation for the remaining packages: midi and extra.
MIDI and Sequencing
The MIDI package can save and load MIDI files, and -last but not least- provides a general purpose sequencer for all the containers and a FluidSynth sequencer subclass. This allows you to play all your data structures straight from Python in just a couple of lines. Most of the icky timing and MIDI code has been abstracted away for you, leaving a clean, relatively simple API.
Extra
Lastly, the extra package includes a LilyPond exporter which can be used to create sheet music in PDF, PNG and postscript. It also offers ASCII tablature and MusicXML exporting and a sound analysis module which can recognize notes and melody in raw audio data.
Learn More About Mingus in the Wiki
Latest news
- 2009/07/07 -- Version 0.4.2.3: Features a new MusicXML module by Javier Palanca and a new SequencerObserver module that can be attached to a Sequencer. Also includes a full copy of the license, a THANKS and an AUTHORS file and updates to the copyright information; so that we can get included in the next Ubuntu release. Release notes.
- 2009/07/02 -- Version 0.4.2.0: Contains the new tunings module, with information about the different kind of tunings for various instruments, and the tablature module built on top of that, which can export all the mingus.containers to pretty ASCII tabs. See the release notes for more details and some examples.
- 2009/06/29 -- Opened a new mailing list targeted specifically at developers and people wishing to follow the project closely. For all commit logs, issue updates and code discussion see mingus-devel
- 2009/06/26 -- Version 0.4.1.0: More new stuff! A general purpose sequencer in the midi package, consonance and dissonance test on NoteContainers and a new module named fft that can analyze raw audio data for frequencies and notes. See the release notes for some examples and more details.
See the complete change log here
Contact
For questions, patches, recommendations and requests, you can contact the mingus google group.
Contribute
The project is currently one year old and new stuff keeps getting added. We are always open to new ideas, suggestions and code so visit the mailing list if you have any ideas or want to contribute to the project.
