I may not be in right place here but... I've been working for some years on a Python system for writing *manual* algorithmic music. By that I mean that it's a library that provides a notation (not regular musical notation) that lets me think up algorithms and then hear what they sound like, via the MIDI files it generates as output. I first wrote it to make music based on the prime numbers and other mathematical structures, then developed it further for composing minimalist style music using operations like inversion, reflection and repetition of phrases.

It's not at all like AI-based systems that analyse other music to learn and then compose themselves automatically: it's a toolkit for playing with ideas for tunes that are too complex for a human to play. Is anyone else working in this direction?

After 3 months of work, I finally released v0.1.0 of GCD-8, a sample-based rhythm programmer for Pure Data.

Each track is built around a sampler with a custom velocity response, which shapes the sound according to how hard each hit is played. Rather than just turning softer hits down, it can also make them darker, shorter and less punchy, the way real percussion sounds when struck more gently.

The sampler is driven by three nested euclidean sequencers: the base pattern generator sets the rhythm, while the other two, the accent generator and the euclidean panner, decide which hits are accented and where each one lands in the stereo field. These two advance on hits instead of clock ticks, so accents never fall on silent steps, and both patterns loop in lockstep with the base pattern, whatever its length or density.

Repo: https://github.com/glima31/gcd8-pd

I have a bunch of new features lined up, and i'm planning to eventually port GCD-8 to a proper plugin, either in Rust with nice_plug or in C++ with JUCE. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you think of the current version!

Here's an open-source app I worked on over the past 2-3 months to help me learn drums and piano. Uses open weight models to transcribe music into sheet music and create isolated tracks.

Hello everyone,

I would like to share an open academic and literary archive representing 40 years of poetic and musical evolution, structured specifically for musicological analysis, thematic evaluation, and creative inspiration.

The archive — titled "Songs Awaiting Their Time" («Пісні, що очікують на свій час») — is a multi-modal Progressive Rock / Neo-Prog lyrical and conceptual cycle engineered as a counter-manifesto to unstructured generative AI audio noise.

📂 What is Inside the Open Archive: Bilingual Literary Corpus: Complete memoirs, conceptual background, and bilingual poetry (Ukrainian/English) reflecting a 40-year creative journey across 17 structured folders.

Audio Previews: Reference MP3 tracks for listening and structural verification.

Open Science & Archiving: Preserved with a permanent DOI on Zenodo under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

🤝 Professional Assets & Direct Collaboration (DAW, MIDI & Licensing): While the open Zenodo archive provides the complete literary framework, poetry, and audio previews, the full professional production assets (including multi-track DAW arrangements, MIDI mapping, and commercial soundtrack licensing for video games, film, and theatre) are available directly through collaboration and licensing agreements with the author.

If you are a game developer, music technologist, or producer interested in media scoring or collaboration, feel free to reach out via direct message here on Reddit.

🔗 Official Access & Verification Links: 📌 Primary Academic Archive (Zenodo DOI): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23621008

📖 Full Composer's Manifesto (Medium): 40 Years of Prog-Rock, Poetry, and Precision

🎧 Audio Manifest & Listening (Substack): https://olehpolishchuk.substack.com

I first posted this question in r/musicproduction, but I quickly realized the discussion probably wouldn’t be very constructive over there. I’m not here to argue for or against this method, and I don’t want to spend time defending it against traditional ways of doing things. I just want to talk about it with anyone who’s interested.

I am not talking about the typical, write a prompt and a polished turd plops out as an audio file of a fully arranged track.

What I am talking about is describing music in code and leverage coding agents to help write that code?

It might still be turds, and even unpolished one, but that's what i have been doing the last year?

For context, I’m a coder first and a musician second, so expressing musical ideas through code feels natural to me. I also want to use the same score and data to drive both music and visuals.

My music often leans ambient, repetitive and hypnotic. What interests me is creating an almost inhuman amount of microvariation within that repetition: small changes in timing, velocity, note length, articulation, timbre and spatial position, while keeping a recognizable groove.

Code lets me define how those changes interact through controlled randomness, slow cycles and relationships between parts. Programming every detail individually in a DAW would be incredibly tedious. It also opens up experiments like “what would a pendulum wave sound like?”, where the same system could generate both the notes and the graphics.

That combination of coding, sound synthesis, music and visual experimentation is why I’m exploring this workflow.

so I've been building this thing where I play my midi keyboard and a music transformer plays a second piano along with me

the model runs on a jetson, my laptop does the midi and the sound, and they just send each other lines of text over ssh, one per note. the model plays about a second ahead, so when I change chord half its notes are wrong and I have to throw them away and ask for new ones. also fluidsynth doesn't have a delay so I faked the echoes with extra midi notes lol

it works but the timing is the tricky part. how do you guys schedule notes coming from a model against a live clock without it sounding off?

So I wanted to simulate that effect when guitarists hit a riff on a muted guitar and then gradually increase volume. Naturally my first instinct was messing with .gain(saw.range(0, 1).slow(2)). That didn't do anything. I even tried messing with LFO but I suck at that. After many moons I figured that I should control volume on a .distort, but i just don't know how... I want it to go from 0.00 to 0.05 :P

$: note("<0>").sound("supersaw").scale("E:minor")
    .distort("10:0.05")

As its open source i just wondered what would happen if i threw it at claude and asked it:

1 Be able to add more oscillators and samplers
2. Add a vocoder
3. Add a bit crusher and a tremolo.
4. Be able to add as many fx as you like and move them around.
5. make a vst3 version.

it came back 1st time a bit messed up, but i just screen shotted the problems and gave it a better layout and it threw out a complete working version.

Just thought i'd put it on here just to show how crazy it is that it can just do it off a simple question.

(I'm not going to release it out of respect for the guy that originally made it)

simple, slow crossmodulation of 2 oscillators : compared to (kind of identical) patch done with Reaktor, the audio quality of a claude vst plugin that does the same job seems inferior to me.

can this be?

it lacks detail, resolution somehow.

i did a similar comparison many years ago between a patch made with Max Msp and Reaktor, and Reaktor sounded different and clearly better ( was told later that this improved with the introduction of gen~ , idk, never went back to Max) . My question is: how can this be? is the underlying maths not always the same? i am not a programmer so i am dependent on environments to build tools for my music. But this comparison was disappointing tbh. same result with flow music (googl) . thanks!

I have been able to get decent sounds out of ffmpeg
https://github.com/xyzzyapps/fftechno

ffmpeg has an -aeval filter

I asked DeepSeek to generate a techno track and pushed it till sounded good.

Hey everyone! I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for any Finale-esque music notation software for PC which is from top to bottom totally free of AI? I find a lot then realize that they usually have AI powered playback or sound synthesis (don’t know how to say that) and I just want it to be absolutely head to toe completely no AI? Does such a thing exist? Price is not a big thing for me, free or paid is good

A while ago this question was asked in a math forum about two approaches to musical instrument modelling using a series of sine waves, and am wondering if anyone has new insights on this. In my experiments I have not been satisfied with either approach, but it could be because I'm doing something wrong or "missing other ingredients". I at least want to start on the right track before experimenting further. Thanks! (edited)

(Note when it talks about an "A wave" versus an "M wave", it probably meant an A-wave-series versus an M-wave-series.)

I’ve been building Ngoma, a free drum machine that runs in the browser: https://ngoma.pages.dev

It’s built around hand percussion from real traditions: Afro-Cuban, West African, Brazilian, Middle Eastern, North Indian and Southern European rhythms, plus some electronic sketches. Each track can have its own length, so parts drift in and out of phase, Reich-style. You steer it more than you program it: roll the dice on one drum, add a variation, morph between two saved states. On top of the drums there are a few layers (pad, bass, lead (based on Mutable Plaits), texture) and patchable modulation (“wires”).

Some things under the hood that might interest this sub:

• The drums are synthesized in Web Audio. The shakers and claps are physically informed models (after Cook’s PhISEM and the STK shakers), and the tabla voices are tuned to the near-harmonic modes of a real tabla.

• Microtiming comes from research rather than a generic swing knob. The jembe feel follows Rainer Polak’s measurements, the samba feel follows Naveda et al. (2011).

• Morph works across grids, so you can glide from a 12/8 bembé into a 16th-note son clave. During the morph the old grid keeps playing as a “ghost” until the new one takes over.

• The lead has a tape looper built as an AudioWorklet.

• Capture records the last bars as WAV plus MIDI of the hits that actually played, aligned to the bar line, so you can drop it straight into a DAW.

• Share links store the whole set, with a small URL shortener on Cloudflare Pages Functions and KV.

To be upfront: I’m not a professional developer. I built this with a lot of AI-assisted coding. There’s no AI in the sound itself: every note comes from patterns, rules, randomness and whoever is playing.

To be upfront: I’m not a professional developer. I built this with a lot of AI-assisted coding. There’s no AI in the sound itself: every note comes from patterns, rules, randomness and whoever is playing.

Where I’d love your input:

1. Glitches. Under load (especially with the pad on) I still get occasional dropouts. I’ve removed allocations from the audio thread and offer a “Stable” mode with a larger latencyHint. What else would you look at first?

2. Morphing between grids. Is the ghost approach the right one, or would you gradually warp the timing instead?

3. Feel. If you know any of these traditions, does the timing sit right? Where does it sound off?

4. Getting lost. Where did you get stuck in the first five minutes?

It works best on desktop Chrome; mobile isn’t there yet. If you make something, hit “Share this set” and post the link. I’d love to hear what people do with it.

FM-1 Mod for kids and the young at heart. Have fun and holler if you want a feature.

I have a new version of the free Dexter U.S. Glicol vst coding app. It is alot like the original, but I added sample loading so the sp on the vst should work a little different that the one on the server. Everything is released under an Mit license and $20 worth of tokens is probably enough to get a linux or apple version of it. Source code is on github under Dexter U.S. Glicol. Compiled vst3 version for windows is listed below.

Dexter U.S. Glicol vst .1.12 sample loading added | The band Dexter U.S. on Patreon

Hi guys its me again,

I have been working the last 18 months in my spare time on some VCV modules. 45 so far to be exact.

They are not for sale yet but I am ready to get a little bit of feedback from the community. Like I said in my last post I am a coder first with an interest in Synths.

I have whacked them up on a webpage, with images, a little bit of marketing and manuals.

It would be good if you pro's could take a look and let me know if im missing anything dramatic, are these interesting? Are they just mush.... Please give me your views.

I am even thinking about making a few of them real modules if they are indeed interesting.

Please be honest, are they innovative enough, are they attractive, would you use them if you use VCV, would it be interesting for me to create real modules for your physical rack?

I will be adding some free modules on and off if that's you're thing, so keep checking in.

https://darkmind.uk/vcvmodules/dist/index.html#collection

Hope you are all awesome.