textbeat VS tonal

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

They're using objects, including arrays [1], so I think they would have been more precise to say that they're using objects and arrays as simple data structures rather than using OO features like inheritance and mutation.

[1] https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/blob/main/packages/chord/in...

It's not on this list, but it's a cool list to check out either way

I'm working on a music project and both tonejs and tonal are incredible projects.

Regarding the "Music Theory library" aspect, note that the CLI tool demonstrates use of the underlying Ruby library which has documentation here:

* https://github.com/pedrozath/coltrane/wiki/Core-music-theory...

Additionally, the author wrote a post about the motivation for creating the library but it's a little difficult to find via the (now broken) link in the README, so here is a direct link to the archived page on the Wayback Machine:

* https://web.archive.org/web/20170714063625/https://medium.co...

If anyone is interested in a similar music theory library for Javascript[0] I've had some success with this:

* Tonal / Tonal.js https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal

[0] Or, in a pinch, even with a Godot 4 web export as I did for my (very incomplete) "AI and Games" Game Jam entry: https://rancidbacon.itch.io/the-conductor (For reasons far too convoluted to go into now.)

There are many hundreds of scale types, here's a list of many of them and that's just a single key. Let's say there's 200 scales times 12 for each key, that's 2400 times up and down the piano. There are actually much more than 200 scales though!

I found a module that is perfect for what I'm trying to create, (a simple piano that you can select keys on to find out which chord it gives), and am trying to use https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal .

Agree with the representation, you can really bury yourself in complexity if you're not careful. Have you taken a look at any of the JS libraries like tonal or MusicTheoryJS?

Here's how tonal.js does it: https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/tree/master/packages

For the music theory stuff I'm using TonalJS along with my own extensions