Muse

Muse is a Ruby DSL for making music. Unlike MIDI, which is a specification for music in a digital form, Muse actually creates the WAV music files itself.

WARNING: This is pre-alpha software where bugs abound and snap and gnash at every mistake you make. Use at your own risk!

If you are keen on music and Ruby, and would like to help out, I'm more than glad to accept more developers! Or musicians. Or both.

To use Muse, install the gem.

gem install muse

Then write your songs, requiring the library in your song.

require 'muse'

Since each Muse song you write is actually a Ruby program, simply run it the way you're used to run a Ruby program, and it will generate a WAV file.

There are 3 levels to be mindful of when writing a song in Muse.

• Song - this is the highest level and represents an entire song
• Bar - this represents a single bar in sheet music and contains a number of notes
• Note - this represents a single musical note

It's important to remember that when you write in Muse you're not writing sheet music. Things like clef or time signatures are no longer important. Even though Muse has a concept of bar of notes, this is merely a convenience. You don't need to have multiple bars, but it's neater to do so.

At this point there are still a number of features not available in Muse, for example you can't do slurs easily.

A song is a collection of bars. You can set the name of the song, which then translates to the name of the WAV file that is created.

Song.record "this_is_my_song" do
   ...
end

The example above creates a file named this_is_my_song.wav.

A bar is a collection of notes. You can set 3 options that will be kept throughout the whole bar.

• beat - (b) The time for each note in the bar
• beats per minute - (bpm) The number of beats per minute. This determines how fast each beat is in actual time
• envelope - (envelope) How the note sounds.

You can group bars together in order to play them at the same time. For example.

bar(3,b:0.25).notes   {e4 b:0.5; _ b:0.5; f4; e4; dis4; e4;}
bar(3,b:0.5).notes    {a3; c3_e3; c3_e3; c3_e3;}

To play 2 or more bars at the same time, just use the same number for the bar. In the example above, there are 2 bar 3s, so both of these bars are played together.

Notice that bars don't need to have the same beat. However, beat of all the notes in each bar summed together, must be the same. In the example above, the beats in the notes in the first bar summed must be the same as the second bar. If they don't match, the bar with the longer timing will find the notes truncated to fit the shorter bar.

Each note is indicated by an alphabet from a to g. Sharps is indicated by adding a is to the end of the note. For example ais is A-sharp. There are no flats in Muse since you can always use a sharp where a flat is.

There is a number added as a suffix to each note, which indicates the octave of the note. The note c3 is the middle-C. The whole octave 3 is the default, and if you don't have a suffix for your note, it's assumed to be in octave 3.

At this point in time, Muse extends from octave 2 to 5 only. Adding more octaves is easy but I'm lazy.

There are 3 options you can use in a note.

• beat - (b) This is the time for the note. The default is 1 if you don't specify, unless it's set at the bar level.
• volume - (v) This is how loud the note should be. The default is 10.
• envelope - (a) This indicates how the note should sound. The default envelope is a cosine wave (check the code please).

Use this keyboard as a reference when writing music.

To keep time in Muse you can use 2 options. The first is the bpm or beats per minute. This is set at the bar level and the default is 120bpm. The second is the beat duration. This can be set at the bar level or at the individual note level. A beat is equivalent to a crochet (or a quarter note) in musical notation.

To indicate a crochet or quarter note at the note level:

a b:1;

To indicate a quaver or eighth note at the bar level:

bar(1,b:0.5).notes {c; e; g;}

Each note in the bar above will be half a beat.

To play double notes or chords or even more notes at the same time, you can concatenate them with underscores like this:

c_e_g; 

This plays 3 notes C, E and G at the same time. This can take in options just like any note. For example:

c_e_g b:1;

This plays the chord for 1 beat.

You can also play chords. The convention for a chord is to start with an underscore. The root note is capitalized. If it's a major chord an M is added as a suffix, if it's a minor chord an m is added instead and so on. Some examples of chords are:

_CM; _D7; _Fm;

Which represents the C major, D7 and F minor chords accordingly. Chords, just like multiple notes, can have the same options as notes have.

Envelopes defines the 'shape' of the sound. The sound wave when first generate is uniform. This means it will sound the same throughout the duration of the note. Applying an envelope creates the variation on how the note sounds.

Envelopes can be specified per note using the 'e' option, or per bar, also with the 'e' option or the entire song, with the 'envelope' option.

The default envelope, if no envelope is specified, is a cosine wave. This means, the note will sound the loudest initially, then taper off towards the end of the note.

A smoother envelope named 'sine' is also provided, which gives a smoother tone of the note as the note gradually becomes louder and is the loudest in the middle of the note, only to taper off at the end.

To add more envelopes, you can extend the Envelope module and add in your own implementation. Please refer to the code.

Sound is created by waves. The default sound for each note in Muse is a pure sine wave, called the fundamental harmonic. This has a very 'electronic' sound. To change how the note sounds like, you can change the harmonic being used. Each harmonic is created by adding additional 'harmonics' on top of the fundamental harmonic, changing the shape of the wave.

Harmonics can be specified per note using the 'h' option, or per bar also with the 'he' option or the entire song, with the 'harmonic' option.

The default harmonic, if none is specified, as mentioned, is a pure sine wave. You can add in your own harmonics to create different sound effects. Please refer to the code to see how this is done.

For examples look into the songs folder. This is an example of the first 9 bars of Alla Turca by Mozart.

Here's the original music score, public domain from the Mutopia Project.

require "muse"
include Muse

# Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11 3rd Movement (All Turca)
# more popularly known as the 'Turkish March' or 'Turkish Rondo'
# first 9 bars only

Song.record 'turkish_march' do
  bar(1,b:0.25).notes   {b4; a4; gis4; a4;}

  bar(2,b:0.25).notes   {c5 b:0.5; _ b:0.5; d5; c5; b4; c5;}
  bar(2,b:0.5).notes    {a3;       c4_e4;   c4_e4;  c4_e4;} 

  bar(3,b:0.25).notes   {e5 b:0.5; _ b:0.5; f5; e5; dis5; e5;}
  bar(3,b:0.5).notes    {a3;       c4_e4;   c4_e4;  c4_e4;} 

  bar(4,b:0.25).notes   {b5; a5; gis5; a5; b5; a5; gis5; a5;}
  bar(4,b:0.5).notes    {a3;     c4_e4;    a3;     c4_e4;}  

  bar(5,b:0.5).notes    {c6 b:1;            a5;     c6;}
  bar(5,b:0.5).notes    {a3;       c4_e4;   c4_e4;  c4_e4;} 

  bar(6,b:0.5).notes    {b5; fis5_a5; e5_g5; fis5_a5; }
  bar(6,b:0.5).notes    {e3; b4_e4; b4_e4; b4_e4;}  

  bar(7,b:0.5).notes    {b5; fis5_a5; e5_g5; fis5_a5; }
  bar(7,b:0.5).notes    {e3; b4_e4; b4_e4; b4_e4;}  

  bar(8,b:0.5).notes    {b5; fis5_a5; e5_g5; dis5_eis5; }
  bar(8,b:0.5).notes    {e3; b4_e4; b2; b4;}  

  bar(9).notes          {e4}
  bar(9).notes          {e4}  
end

Muse from version 0.0.5 runs 4 parallel processes when generating the music file, using the Parallel library by Michael Grosser. This runs a whole lot faster than versions prior to 0.0.5

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.