Music

Extreme-fidelity synthesis of musical elements.

Music generates and manipulates sound in LPCM audio, sample by sample. It implements MASS (Music and Audio in Sample Sequences), a collection of psychophysical descriptions of musical elements expressed as equations and corresponding Python routines.

import music

# a chromatic scale, written to a WAV file
notes = [music.note(440 * 2 ** (i / 12), duration=0.25) for i in range(13)]
scale = [music.adsr(sonic_vector=n) for n in notes]   # so the joins are silent
music.write_wav_mono(music.horizontal_stack(*scale), "scale.wav")

The adsr is not decoration. A note ends wherever its phase lands and the next one opens at the bottom of its wavetable, so concatenating them raw steps -- by up to the full scale, and on nine of this scale's twelve joins. An envelope runs each note to silence at both ends, which is what makes the joins joins rather than clicks.

📖 Tutorial — from a single note to a short stereo piece. 📖 Where to start — the few routines a common task needs. 📖 API reference — every routine documented with the equation it implements and the article it comes from.

Core features

• Sample-based synthesis. State is updated at every sample. A note with a vibrato has a different instantaneous frequency at each of its samples, and the vibrato pattern is folded into the wavetable lookup rather than applied afterwards, so the rendered sound is as close as it can be to the mathematical model that describes it.
• Band-limited synthesis, when you ask for it. A wavetable read at every sample folds the partials above the Nyquist frequency back into the band -- a 10 kHz sawtooth puts 24 % of its energy between its own harmonics -- and note keeps that, as MASS specifies. bandlimited_note renders a fixed pitch without them, render_oversampled renders any generator at several times the rate and filters it, for FM, glissandi and hard gates, and music.core.synths has oscillators for a pitch that moves.
• Musical structures with an emphasis on symmetry and discourse: permutation groups, change-ringing peals and plain changes.
• Music theory as the MASS companion paper states it: the seven diatonic modes and the single step pattern each is a rotation of, the three minor scales, the triads and the tetrads that extend them, the intervals and their traditional names, and the harmonic series. All in semitones from a tonic of zero, so a scale becomes frequencies and then sound in two steps.
• Filter design. iir applies coefficients; low_pass, high_pass, band_pass and band_reject compute them, from the four designs the article specifies.
• Head-related transfer functions. setup_hrtf() fetches the KEMAR measurements into your cache and hrir() reads a direction out of them, so a source can be placed above you or behind you -- cues the geometric localize cannot carry. The package ships no measurements and models no head; it reads someone else's.
• Bonds between a note's characteristics, so a piece decides once how its notes behave rather than note by note -- a vibrato that speeds up as the line rises, a tremolo that only appears above middle C.
• Sensory stimulation. Seven auditory stimuli -- binaural, monaural and isochronic beats, amplitude and frequency modulation, modulated noise and spatial motion -- each named for the technique it implements in SSTIM, the Sensory Stimulation Vocabulary, and a StimulationSession that renders a protocol of them: phases in order, crossfaded rather than cut, lasting exactly the sum of the durations you wrote down. The sample-accurate synthesis is the point here, because the frequency difference the stimulus. Each stimulus, and a session, can be written as an SSTIM description and rendered back from one, and a description another tool wrote is rendered from SSTIM's own terms, given only what they cannot say.

Music can be used alone or with other packages, and it is well suited to the audiovisualization of data. It works with Percolation and Participation for harnessing open linked social data, and with the audiovisual analytics vocabulary and ontology (AAVO).

To understand the routines further, read Musical elements in the discrete-time representation of sound. If you use this package, please cite that article.

Every release is archived on Zenodo, so a specific version can be cited too: 10.5281/zenodo.22151793 always resolves to the newest one. GitHub's Cite this repository button reads CITATION.cff and gives you both, formatted.

How to install

pip install music

Requires Python 3.10 or newer. Everything needed to synthesise, filter and write audio comes with it; the dependencies are declared in pyproject.toml.

The rest is optional, an extra at a time. PrimaryTables.draw_tables(), which plots the waveform tables so you can look at them, needs matplotlib:

pip install 'music[plot]'

Nothing else in the package uses it, and it is imported only when draw_tables runs, so leaving it out costs nothing else.

sing needs espeak-ng, a system program, and Praat, through praat-parselmouth:

sudo apt install espeak-ng        # or: brew install espeak-ng
pip install 'music[singing]'

Its second backend, eCantorix, is a Perl program the package clones for you; see Singing for what it needs.

render_oversampled needs SciPy, and writing stimuli as SSTIM descriptions needs RDFLib and SSTIM's own validator:

pip install 'music[antialias]'
pip install 'music[sstim]'

play_audio plays a sound through sounddevice, which on Linux needs the PortAudio library as well (sudo apt install libportaudio2). The permutation groups and change-ringing peals are built from sympy's, about 74 MB that most callers never need, so they are an extra too; their names import without it, and building one says what to install:

pip install 'music[play]'
pip install 'music[structures]'

To hack on it, install from a checkout so your edits take effect immediately:

git clone https://github.com/ttm/music.git
pip install -e music

A closer look

Every routine returns a numpy array of PCM samples, so results compose with each other and with anything else you can express in numpy.

Sample rate

Every routine works at 44,100 Hz unless told otherwise. Rather than pass sample_rate to each call, set it once -- for the rest of a script, or in a with statement for one block; a rate given to a routine still wins:

music.set_sample_rate(48000)
with music.set_sample_rate(96000):
    high = music.note(440, duration=1)    # 96,000 samples
samples, rate = music.read_audio("in.wav", return_sample_rate=True)

read_audio gives a file's rate when asked, and warns when the file is at a rate other than the default and you did not ask, since played back at the default it would be at the wrong pitch. The writers normalize to full scale unless told normalize=False, which keeps the levels a piece was rendered at across the files it is written to.

Notes and envelopes

note = music.note_with_vibrato(freq=220, duration=2,
                               vibrato_freq=6, max_pitch_dev=0.5)
shaped = music.adsr(sonic_vector=note, attack_ms=80,
                    sustain_level=-6, release_ms=200)

Durations are in seconds, envelope stages in milliseconds, levels in decibels and pitch deviations in semitones — each parameter in the unit it is usually thought about in. The few in milliseconds end in _ms, so a duration without that ending is in seconds.

Band-limited synthesis

note reads its table as MASS does, so a rich waveform's partials above the Nyquist frequency fold back into the band. bandlimited_note drops them for the note's pitch, and render_oversampled renders a whole generator at a multiple of the rate, for what one pitch's table cannot help:

folded = music.note(10000, duration=1,
                    waveform_table=music.waveform_table("sawtooth"))
clean = music.bandlimited_note(10000, duration=1, waveform="sawtooth")
swept = music.render_oversampled(music.note_with_fm, duration=1,
                                 freq=6000, fm=300, max_fm_deviation=4000)

The sawtooth that kept 24 % of its energy off its harmonics keeps about 1e-16. Band-limited synthesis has the oscillators for a pitch that moves, by partials, with PolyBLEP or from mipmapped tables, what each is measured to do, and where the folding of FM, gates and waveshaping comes from, line by line.

Scales, chords and intervals

Everything is counted in semitones from a tonic of zero, which is what pitch_to_freq takes:

freqs = music.pitch_to_freq(220.0, music.scale("dorian"))
chord = music.pitch_to_freq(220.0, music.chord("minor seventh"))
music.write_wav_mono(music.mix_many(
    [music.note(f, duration=1.5) for f in chord]), "chord.wav")

The seven modes are one step pattern read from seven places, and mode_by_rotation reaches them that way rather than by name. Intervals can be written the way a musician writes them:

music.interval("M3"), music.interval("P11")     # (4, 17)
music.interval_names(6)                         # ('aug4', 'dim5', 'TT')
music.consonance("P4")                          # 'context dependent'

Filters, designed

Cutoffs are fractions of the sample rate — fraction_of converts Hertz — so the same coefficients describe the same filter at any rate:

a, b = music.low_pass(music.fraction_of(1000))
muffled = music.iir(music.noise("white", duration=2), a, b)

Bonds

A vibrato whose rate follows the pitch, and a depth that falls as it rises:

voice = music.Bonds(vibrato_freq=music.proportional(1 / 40),
                    max_pitch_dev=music.inversely_proportional(400))
music.write_wav_mono(voice.render([220, 277, 330, 440], duration=0.5),
                     "bound.wav")

Placing a source with measured ears

localize puts a source on the ear axis from its geometry alone, so it cannot tell front from back. A measured response can:

music.setup_hrtf()                       # once; about 1.3 MB into your cache
_, _, left, right = music.hrir(elevation=30, azimuth=270)   # above, behind
music.write_wav_stereo(music.localize_hrtf(music.note(duration=2),
                                           left, right), "behind.wav")

Change ringing

Permutation groups and the peals of campanology, acted on any domain you like — here on frequencies, so the peal is the melody. They need pip install 'music[structures]':

peal = music.PlainChanges(4)                      # every permutation, once
rows = peal.act([220, 275, 330, 440])
notes = [music.note(freq, duration=0.2) for row in rows for freq in row]
music.write_wav_mono(music.horizontal_stack(*notes), "campanology.wav")

Spatialisation

A source moving from one side to the other, its interaural time and intensity differences computed at every sample from its position:

passing = music.localize_linear(music.note(330, duration=3),
                                theta1=150, theta2=30, dist=0.6)
music.write_wav_stereo(passing, "passing.wav")

Sequencing

seq = music.Sequencer()
for i, freq in enumerate([440, 550, 660]):
    seq.add_note(freq, start=i * 0.25, duration=1.0,
                 adsr_params={"attack_ms": 20, "release_ms": 400})
seq.write("chord.wav")

Noise

Six colours, each defined by its gain per octave — brown at −6 dB, pink at −3, white at 0, blue at +3, violet at +6, black at −12 — or any number you pass instead:

colours = [music.noise(kind, duration=0.5)
           for kind in ("brown", "pink", "white", "blue", "violet")]
music.write_wav_mono(music.horizontal_stack(*colours), "colours.wav")

A seed draws the same noise again, and leaves NumPy's global random state alone.

Sensory stimulation

Each stimulus is named for the SSTIM technique it implements, and a session plays them in order, crossfaded:

session = music.StimulationSession(end_ramp=0.5)
session.add(music.binaural_beats, duration=30, carrier_freq=200,
            beat_freq=10)
session.add(music.modulated_noise, duration=30, ramp=2,
            noise_type="pink", seed=1)
music.write_wav_stereo(session.render(), "session.wav")

With pip install 'music[sstim]', the session can be written as SSTIM descriptions of its stimuli, in the order the session plays them, and rendered back from them sample for sample:

from music.stimulation.sstim import render_sstim, to_sstim_graph

graph = to_sstim_graph(session, base="https://your-lab.example/plans/1/")
graph.serialize("session.ttl", format="turtle")
again = render_sstim("session.ttl")

A description says what a stimulus is, not that anyone heard it or that it does anything. Stimuli in SSTIM has the rest: a session written as SSTIM's own plan, a description another tool wrote rendered from SSTIM's terms with only what they cannot say given, and what can be rendered from a graph before anything is.

Singing

A lyric is sung one syllable a note: syllables joined by hyphens, words parted by spaces, each note a pitch in semitones above middle C and a duration in quarter notes, at 120 a minute unless L and Q say otherwise, as ABC notation writes them:

twinkle = music.sing(text="Twin-kle, twin-kle, lit-tle star",
                     notes=(0, 0, 7, 7, 9, 9, 7), durs=(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2))
music.write_wav_mono(twinkle, "twinkle.wav")

# in French, trembling in a room: stereo, ringing a second past the line
frere = music.sing(text="Frè-re Jac-ques, dor-mez vous?",
                   notes=(0, 2, 4, 0, 4, 5, 7), durs=(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2),
                   lang="fr", effect="tremolo")
music.write_wav_stereo(frere, "frere.wav")

# the same score with eCantorix, the reference: same pitches, same lengths
reference = music.sing(text="Twin-kle, twin-kle, lit-tle star",
                       notes=(0, 0, 7, 7, 9, 9, 7),
                       durs=(1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2), backend="ecantorix")

The default backend, psola, is the package's own. It needs espeak-ng and pip install 'music[singing]'. espeak-ng says each syllable, and Praat's pitch-synchronous overlap-add holds it at its note's pitch and length. A syllable said in less time than its note is said again, down to 80 words a minute, as eCantorix has espeak say it; then only the middle of its vowel is lengthened, so the consonants keep their length. A long note gets a vibrato, 0.35 semitones each way at 5.5 Hz, setting in a quarter of a second into it. The notes on the meter's strong beats are sung up to 2.3 dB louder, the accents abc2midi gives eCantorix. With this timing, Whisper, a speech recogniser, heard 69 of 192 sung test words, against 44 with the plain stretch it replaced and 59 with eCantorix; the vibrato and the accents left that where it was. effect takes eCantorix's "tremolo", "melt" and "flite", made with the package's own tremolo, reverberation and resampling.

backend="ecantorix" sings with the eCantorix engine. It was the default until the package had its own singer, and is kept as the reference. Run music.singing.setup_engine() once to clone it, at the revision this package is pinned to, into your user cache directory (set MUSIC_ECANTORIX_DIR to put it elsewhere). It drives espeak through a Makefile, so it also needs git, make, perl, espeak, abc2midi (the abcmidi package) and sox on the system. It needs the Perl modules MIDI, Math::FFT, URI::Escape and Digest::SHA too (cpan MIDI Math::FFT URI::Escape). setup_engine() says which of these are missing.

To compare the two: singing_backends and singing_effects sing the same songs and effects with each, side by side. python tools/compare_singing.py measures both against the score: the pitch of every note, the length and the render time. tools/compare_singing_timing.py renders the singer's timings and syllable shapes for a level-matched listening review, and tools/score_singing_asr.py has Whisper count the words it hears in each.

Examples

Inside the examples folder you can find some scripts that use the main features of Music.

• chromatic_scale: writes twelve notes into a WAV file from a sequence of frequencies.
• penta_effects: writes a pentatonic scale five times, plain, gliding up 30 Hz on each note, with a vibrato, with a Doppler shift and with FM, into a stereo WAV file.
• noisy: writes into a WAV file a sequence of different noises.
• thirty_notes and thirty_numpy_notes generate a sequence of sounds by using a synth class (in this case the class Being).
• campanology and geometric_music both use Being as their synth, but this time with permutations.
• isynth also uses a synth class, but of a different kind, IteratorSynth, that iterates through arbitrary lists of variables.
• singing_demo: sings Mary had a little lamb with music.sing, and writes it to a WAV file.
• singing_backends: sings four songs, in English, French and German, and one slowly, with both singing backends, a file each, to be heard side by side.

Package structure

The modules are:

• core:
  • synths for the synthesis of notes (including vibratos, glissandos, etc.), noises and envelopes, and the band-limited notes and oscillators.
  • filters for the application of filters such as ADSR envelopes, fades, IIR and FIR, reverb, loudness, and localization, and for designing the coefficients the IIR ones take.
  • io for reading, writing and playing audio, both mono and stereo.
  • functions for normalization.
• structures for higher level musical structures: permutations and the algebraic groups they form, change-ringing peals, and symmetry, built from sympy's, which the structures extra installs.
• theory for scales, chords and the harmonic series. Counterpoint, harmonic expansion and modulation are described in the companion paper and are not there yet.
• bonds for tying a note's vibrato and tremolo to its frequency, which is where an arbitrary construction of that kind goes.
• legacy for the synthesizer classes the examples play with, CanonicalSynth, IteratorSynth and Being, and for musical pieces rendered with them, which might be used as material to make more music.
• stimulation for sensory-stimulation work: the seven stimuli above, each carrying the SSTIM term it implements, StimulationSession for sequencing them into a protocol, and music.stimulation.sstim, which writes them as SSTIM descriptions, reads them back, and reads what other tools write.
• singing for sing and its two backends: psola, the package's own singer, and perform, which writes the score and runs the eCantorix engine that bootstrap clones and paths finds.
• hrtf for fetching the KEMAR measurements into your cache and reading a direction's impulse responses out of them.
• tables for the generation of lookup tables for some basic waveforms.
• utils for various functions regarding conversions, mix, etc.
• sequencer for scheduling notes into a timeline and exporting audio.

Plans

See the findings and prioritized roadmap for the September 2026 review, the correctness patches since 1.8.1, the mutation audits of all eighteen areas of the package, every module it has, and the band-limited synthesis and SSTIM work since 1.10.0.

Concrete things the code itself is waiting for, rather than a wish list:

• A head-related transfer function this package computes. music.hrtf reads Gardner and Martin's KEMAR measurements, which closes the gap for anyone willing to fetch them, but the package models no head of its own: a direction nobody measured is answered with the nearest one somebody did. (localize and localize2 still carry neither elevation nor front-against-back, and say so in their own notes.)
• Being.walk's perm-walk method, which was never restored from its predecessor and is currently a reconstruction. (Peals.twenty_all_over and Peals.an_eight_and_forty no longer raise; this entry used to say they did.)
• Counterpoint, harmonic expansion and modulation, which the companion paper describes and music.theory does not implement.
• Checking the routines MASS has no counterpart for. RECONCILIATION.md compares the package with the MASS reference implementation routine by routine — 22 of 35 are reproduced sample for sample, 9 diverge for reasons it states, and in 4 the reference itself does not run. tests/test_article.py checks the article's equations instead of its code, and covers 46 of 47 labelled equations: all 46 that a test could settle. Routines without a MASS counterpart also have signal-property and composition tests, and the mutation audits measure, one area at a time, whether the assertions detect deliberate implementation errors; every module is in an area, measured again when it changes. DISCREPANCIES.md is where the article, the reference implementation and this package are recorded as disagreeing.
• An article describing the package, as a companion to the MASS one.

Contributing

CONTRIBUTING.md is the longer version: what a change has to survive, why a test that checks the shape of the output is worth little here, and how to report something that sounds wrong. Participation is under the Code of Conduct.

The test, type-check, lint and documentation tooling comes with the dev and docs extras:

pip install -e '.[dev,docs]'

pytest                                       # the suite, at 100% line and branch coverage
mypy music                                   # type check
ruff check music tests examples tools conftest.py  # lint, at PEP 8's 79 columns
sphinx-build -b html -W docs docs/_build/html
python tools/run_examples.py                 # run every example
python tools/assessment_figures.py --fast    # the figures the docs quote
python -m build --wheel
python tools/check_wheel.py --wheel dist/*.whl # installed artifact, outside the checkout

These checks run on every push and every pull request. Lint, types and tests run on Python 3.10 through 3.14 on Linux; a further Linux job installs the exact lower bounds pyproject.toml declares and runs the tests against those, so the floors cannot drift into fiction. The docs build, examples and figures run once each. Installed wheels are checked on Linux, macOS and Windows with Python 3.12. CI runs pytest with --cov=music --cov-branch --cov-fail-under=100; Sphinx treats documentation warnings as errors.

run_examples.py exercises the code readers copy. A change that broke three examples once passed every package check. assessment_figures.py is there because the numbers in ASSESSMENT.md and this file went stale four times in two days when keeping them current was a habit rather than a check. Its measured figures are one table in ASSESSMENT.md, written and checked at release; on every push --fast checks what prose quotes, the version stamps and the reconciliation register's counts.

Four more run at release time rather than on every push, being slower or needing something the runner does not have:

python tools/check_sdist.py         # build the sdist, unpack it, run its tests
python tools/article_coverage.py --strict # fail missing sources or test citations
python tools/mass_reconcile.py      # this package against the MASS reference
python tools/verify_subjects.py --strict # fail unexpected unresolved subjects

The last three need a MASS checkout or the network. MASS comparisons are documented in RECONCILIATION.md and DISCREPANCIES.md; two known EuroSciVoc exceptions remain explicitly unverified. Run the complete workflow during development with python tools/release.py verify --mass ../mass. See RELEASING.md for prerequisites and release behavior.

Docstrings are numpydoc style throughout, and the code follows PEP 8. For the maths behind a routine, examples of its use, and the article it comes from, read its docstring — or the rendered API reference.

Support

music has been developed and maintained in the open since 2016. If it is useful to you, your research or your institution, please consider supporting its continued development through GitHub Sponsors.

Sponsorship pays for the unglamorous work that makes a scientific package trustworthy — the fidelity tests, the full coverage, the documented equations, the archived and citable releases — and keeps every bit of it free for everyone.

For institutions and companies: commissioned features, integration support and sponsored development are available, with the results released under the same open license. Open an issue or get in touch to discuss scope.

Further information

Music is primarily intended for artistic use, psychophysics experiments and data sonification.

You can find an example in Versinus, an animated visualization method for evolving networks that uses Music to render the musical track that represents networks structures.