Coltrane VS textbeat

https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane Has gotten me thinking about AI for teaching music theory, but I really don't think it is there yet, music theory is far to fuzzy for AI right now. I do think there are niches where it could be quite great, it could absolutely do well in teaching much of counterpoint and classical forms, perhaps even the basics of harmony but it is hard to disentangle harmony from the fuzzy areas and I could see AI doing more damage than good there.

> because none of the commands work

The Readme had some outdated information. Explained better on the issue https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane/issues/56

> The chords for guitar also are weird. It doesn't seem to be using traditional shapes, but is looking for available notes within a fret range. Which leads to difficult, basically unusable fingerings.

That's a design choice on this library. I tried to rely the least as possible on lookup tables, dictionaries, etc, leaving things to be discovered algorithmically instead. It is a difficult challenge, but for example if someone decides to use an entirely different tuning, the software will provide. The software might also find chords that you have never thought about. What has to be improved here is the sorting mechanism for guitar chords.

> The other functions would be very useful to have, if it worked

Just try running `coltrane` and test it interactively.

There's this https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane

Coltrane music theory library on the command line

I tried it on textbeat which is in python and it wasn't understanding too much, with the exception of how the callstack worked in the parser. My questions may have been too usage-specific and not enough about the internals but I used up all my free usage credits so I couldn't continue.

My text-based music sequencer has some music theory support and it also has a REPL:

https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat

I haven't worked on it in a while, but you might like textbeat (https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat). It's a midi tracker and REPL that lets you type in music theory-like terminology and plays it. It's nowhere near a modern DAW but it's cool for tinkering and learning.

I've used Bitwig as a plugin host for textbeat before and it was quite fun. Textbeat is a project of mine that lets you write music in "plain text" with notation for chords, scales, and articulations. I haven't worked on it in a while though.

I love these text-based languages for music composition. Its something that is approaching a gap in music composition in real-life vs via computer. In real-life you can tell your bandmates to "just play a I V IV in C" and they get it. But we are still not quite at a place where we can tell a computer that exact phrase and get something useful. I love how close these text-based languages are getting though!

I've actually made my own musical language too - called miti [1], which is just one of many others including textbeat [2], foxdot [3], sonic-pi [4], chuck [5], and melrose [6]. Each has their own goals and capabilities.

- [1] https://github.com/schollz/miti

- [2] https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat

- [3] https://foxdot.org/

- [4] https://sonic-pi.net/

- [5] https://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/

- [6] https://github.com/emicklei/melrose