Like Unicode, but for music. Ish.
"Ladies and gentlemen, many songs have been written, and this is one of them." — Cannonball Adderley, via Mo' Horizons, "Yes Baby Yes (Sally Said)"
Music is probably humanity's most important endeavour. It enfolds the sum of our collective knowledge about space, time, mathematics, physics, psychology, spirituality, love, and all other essential questions. It's not surprising, then, that the Internet abounds with software that attempts to capture glimpses of this all-encompassing system.
More specifically, though, the Internet abounds with mainstream Western music software, i.e. based on the contemporary Western music practice of 12-tet tuning, nomenclature, instrumentation, repertoire, etc. As a person with a multicultural background, I find this bias highly limiting, both to my own musical growth, as well as to the free spread of worldwide musical cultures - which are providing endless inspiration (and I'm being very charitable here) for the Western music industry in its continuous quest for novelty and profit.
This repo is my modest attempt at providing a rational, ontological foundation to build music software that can express not only mainstream Western music, but also other musics that go beyond the former's boundaries and assumptions. I call this approach "music internationalization" (in code, music-i18n), and I've been thinking, writing, coding and experimenting about it for a few years now.
In this ontological approach, the atomic unit is not the note, but the interval. An interval is a ratio of frequencies, and it is the building block for a tuning, which represents a sequence of intervals that can generate tones given a base frequency. A tone is still not a note: it has no duration; it is an abstract object, just like the ideal point.
Out of tone sequences, we create tone rows which can be non-repeating sequences like scales, or repeating like chords.
In order to communicate about music, we need to give human names to the tones, the intervals, etc. This is where solmization comes in. The same tuning can be represented by several solmizations, depending on the music culture we are expressing. Internally, we represent tone steps in Scientific Pitch Notation in order to facilitate exchange with other music systems like MusicXML.
Eventually, we want to inject time into the mix, to express notes, beats and higher-level time-bound objects. It's a slow process that requires that the abstractions perfectly snap into place. I don't expect to be done soon 😅