Making Music and Embedding Sounds in Jupyter Notebooks

It’s looking as if the new level 1 courses won’t be making use of Jupyter notebooks (unless I can find a way of sneaking them in via the single unit I’be put together!;-) but I still think they’re worth spending time exploring for course material production as well as presentation.

So to this end, as I read through the materials being drafted by others for the course, I’ll be looking for opportunities to do the quickest of quick demos, whenever the opportunity arises, to flag things that might be worth exploring more in future.

So here’s a quick example. One of the nice design features of TM112, the second of the two new first level courses, is that it incorporates some mimi-project activities for students work on across the course. One of the project themes relates to music, so I wondered what doing something musical in a Jupyter notebook might look like.

The first thing I tried was taking the outlines of one of the activities – generating an audio file using python and MIDI – to see how the embedding might work in a notebook context, without the faff of having to generate an audio file from python and then find a means of playing it:

Yep – that seems to work… Poking around music related libraries, it seems we can also generate musical notation…

In fact, we can also generate musical notation from a MIDI file too…

(I assume the mappings are correct…)

So there may be opportunities there for creating simple audio files, along with the corresponding score, within the notebooks. Then any changes required to the audio file, as well as the score, can be effected in tandem.

I also had a quick go at generating audio files “from scratch” and then embedding the playable audio file

 

That seems to work too…

We can also plot the waveform:

This might be handy for a physics or electronics course?

As well as providing an environment for creating “media-ful” teaching resources, the code could also provide the basis of interactive student explorations. I don’t have a demo of any widget powered examples to hand in a musical context (maybe later!), but for now, if you do want to play with the notebooks that generated the above, you can do so on mybinder – http://mybinder.org/repo/psychemedia/ou-tm11n – in the midiMusic.ipynb and Audio.ipynb notebooks. The original notebooks are here: https://github.com/psychemedia/OU-TM11N

PS this looks like it could be handy: https://github.com/akaihola/jupyter_abc, a Jupyter notebook extension to render abc notation, h/t Antti Kaihola.