Whether you are interested in using code to develop or adapt musical ideas, turn mathematical functions or data into music, or generally explore the intersection of music and programming, this talk will give you a place to start. This talk will introduce you to what algorithmic composition is, what free and open source frameworks exist for algorithmic composition, and some basic concepts of music theory that are important for composing music with code. Then, it will delve into creating algorithms to explore existing musical forms, as well as creating algorithms to make music out of statistical data. You will both see how the programs are structured, as well as hear the music generated by the code. Code examples are in Python, but music theory and programming concepts will be explained in a language-independent way, so you can apply the concepts in any programming language or algorithmic composition framework.

nicolle neulist, otherwise known as rogueclown, has been interested in music her entire life, and has been playing with computers in various capacities since she was three. She gave a presentation at Notacon 8 entitled “The Free Software Studio: Open-Source Tools for Musical Exploration and Composition”. nicolle has been an avid singer since she was young. However, until discovering computers as musical instruments, her lack of finger dexterity made it rather difficult for her to translate her knowledge of music theory into anything but vocal music. Given her love of both music and writing code, the day she discovered algorithmic composition was a very happy one, indeed.