JazzRobot

Scripts to read chords from a file, and then generate MIDI data to be played by a MIDI device.

So far, all chords are built from stacking thirds. There's no support for quartal voicings, or anything else, just vanilla chords.

Voice leading is achieved by using inversions of chords until the difference between one chord and the next is minimized. At the moment, the voicing for the entire score is define deterministically from the voicing of the first chord, which by default is in root position, in the fifth octave.

Setup

This project includes a requirements.txt, so you can use it with a virtual environment like so,

cd jazz
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

To use this, you'll need to setup a MIDI device to play the MIDI data output by the program.

To play MIDI music through Garage Band,

1. Open the Audio MIDI Setup app
2. Choose Window > Show MIDI Studio
3. Double-click on IAC Driver
4. Check Device is online
5. Start Garage Band and add a software MIDI track
6. Try to run app.py

Usage

By default, this plays Blue in Green, but you can supply a file to be played.

python3 app.py blue-in-green.txt