Inevitable Cacophony

An attempt to automatically generate music in Dwarf Fortress' generated musical styles.

Installation:

gem install inevitable_cacophony

Then run Inevitable Cacophony through the executable (there isn't a stable Ruby API yet). To play a specific rhythm (in the notation Dwarf Fortress uses):

inevitable_cacophony --beat -e '| ! x X x |' > rhythm.wav

You can also play polyrhythms where each component rhythm is simply | x x ... x |. (More complex rhythms are possible but you'll need to write out a full musical form to describe them.)

inevitable_cacophony --beat --polyrhythm 7:11 > polyrhythm.wav

To generate a tune from a given form description (support is pretty limited so far):

inevitable_cacophony < form_description.txt > form.wav

At this stage you will need to type out the game's form description by hand to use as input.

See inevitable_cacophony --help for other options and features.

Inevitable Cacophony generates output as uncompressed WAV on standard output. You could save this as a file (as shown), or pipe into a tool such as aplay to hear it immediately.

MIDI (-m option) and Scala tuning files (-M) are of course not generated as WAV.

To work on Inevitable Cacophony you will need some Ruby development tools installed, starting with the Ruby language itself. Normally you'd install Ruby using a version manager, such as RVM. (I believe that only works on Unix systems; I'm not sure what you'd do on Windows, sorry.)

Once you have RVM installed, running rvm use will read the .ruby_version file, and enable the correct Ruby in your shell (or tell you how to install it, if needed).

You will then need to install the Ruby gems Cacophony depends on, which is done through Bundler. Once you have Bundler installed, running bundle install will install all the necessary dependencies.

If everything's worked, you should be able to run the tests, with:

bundle exec rspec

and run Inevitable Cacophony with:

bundle exec inevitable_cacophony [args]

Everything in Inevitable Cacophony is motivated by the impressively thorough musical-form generation of Tarn and Zach Adams' Dwarf Fortress.

More personally, I'm indebted to Laurence Walker (Ohokwy) and Toby Walker (Wonkyth) for letting me pick their brains on music theory.

I've also consulted various pages on music theory and file formats, including but not limited to:

• "Digital Audio Primer", Joel Strait, documentation for the WaveFile gem
• "Scala scale file format", Manuel op de Cool