mydough - read and write MIDI files from R

Motivation

Algorithmic composition requires the ability to read and write Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) files (Back 1999). While there are other R packages that read or write MIDI files, they add other capabilities that might not be necessary, like creating audio files or printable scores, read MIDI files but don’t write them, or require an external music engraving package like “MuseScore” or “lilypond”.

In addition, some of the other packages have an implicit or explicit focus on the standard Western 12-tone equal temperament scheme of tuning musical instruments. Microtonal composers like myself need to be able to express our scores in whatever music theory we find convenient. The MIDI standard now provides means for escaping the 12-tone equal tempered realm, and several physical synthesizers and many software ones can use these escapes.

mydough has a deliberately narrow scope - just read and write MIDI files! mydough interfaces to the Python mido (Mido Project 2023) MIDI library via reticulate (Ushey, Allaire, and Tang 2023). mydough is completely independent of other Python environments you may or may not have on your system. It installs its own isolated conda virtual environment and its own copy of mido.

About the name

As I noted above, other R packages that read and write MIDI have features I don’t need, and I pronounce mido “MY-dough”. So here it is - mido without the stuff I don’t … knead.

Getting started

1. Install remotes from CRAN.
2. remotes::install_github("AlgoCompSynth/mydough").
3. mydough::install_mido().

install_mido() will install Miniconda in the system-dependent default location if it can’t find an existing conda.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the mydough project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

References

Back, David. 1999. “Standard MIDI File Format, Updated — Music.mcgill.ca.” https://www.music.mcgill.ca/~ich/classes/mumt306/StandardMIDIfileformat.html.

Mido Project. 2023. “Mido - MIDI Objects for Python — Mido 1.2.10 Documentation — Mido.readthedocs.io.” https://mido.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html.

Ushey, Kevin, JJ Allaire, and Yuan Tang. 2023. Reticulate: Interface to ’Python’. https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/.