Analyzing and composing music in Python

Question

I wanted to know how can I go about analyzing a music piece and further create a similar sounding music. There must be some quantifiable parameters of a music piece that must be sufficient to compose it. If yes, what are those parameters and how can we obtain them from a music? Preferably in Python.

Answer 1

Your question covers a variety of different problems, all of which have their own approaches. The generation of melodies, and the generation of accompanying harmonisations are often considered separately, with techniques involving Cellular Automata, Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms variously documented online with regard to melody generation. Hidden Markov Models are the most common approach to the harmonisation problem, although techniques from Natural Language Processing and Genetic Algorithms have also been applied. In addition, the definition and extraction of the input parameters in both steps is a separate and also interesting problem, particularly in the case of harmonisation.

Googling any of these topics and adding the words "music" and "algorithm" or "generation" should yield dozens of interesting results, which are far too voluminous to discuss in any useful detail here. In addition, for exploration of any of these approaches in Python, I would have a look at MIT's Music21 library. It has a non-trivial learning curve, but it can be quite powerful, depending on the approach you're taking.