News You Can Bruise for 2006 February 22

I'm done with my Cookbook recipes (the rest are contributors' or Lucas's), so I'm writing some additional recipes about really cool things. This because 1) such things are, by definition, really cool, and 2) I hope that their very presence will make people want to buy the book. They will leap out at you from the table of contents and say "I am awesome! Buy this book at once!". That's the plan, anyway.

Today's cool thing is Ruby's midilib, the... wait for it... Ruby interface to MIDI files. I did a recipe that shows how to visualize data as a MIDI file, and how to compose algorithmic music (sample composition).

While learning about midilib I came up with an observation about MIDI, which is that it's good for accurately representing what happens when you play a real instrument. It's kind of frustrating and unnormalized if you need to programatically compose music. I ended up taking a tip from the excellent MIDI Scripter project, and showing how to write a little wrapper on top of midilib that makes composition easier.

The experience gave me a huge number of ideas for musical programming projects. With my near-total lack of theoretical training, I will be unencumbered by traditional notions of "harmony" and "taste". For one, I plan to get into fractal music, though probably not the way the author of that web page defines it. Hard to tell, with that color scheme.