Music as Code

I'm a percussionist by training and an electronic musician by history, and for five years I made almost no music at all. Then AI collaboration broke the block, and what came out the other side wasn't a return to the old studio — it was something stranger: music written in Python. Scores that are scripts. Synthesis from first principles. Tools that listen to language the way an ear does.

This thread collects that body of work. The premise underneath all of it: code and music are both languages for structuring time, and the boundary between composing and programming was always thinner than it looked.

The Breakthrough

• PyTheory: Breaking Through Five Years of Creative Block with AI — The origin story. Five years of silence ended by a music theory library and a thinking partner.
• PyTheory Is Awesome — The library itself: fretboards, chords, and theory as data structures.

The Instrument Is the Interpreter

• A Mini DAW in the Python REPL — A digital audio workstation that fits in a prompt.
• NumPy as Synth Engine — Synthesis from arrays. No samples, no plugins, just math becoming sound.
• Free OP-XY Presets, Made from Python — The Python synthesis engine feeding patches to hardware.

The Album

• Interpretations: An Album Written in Python — Twenty-four tracks, each one a script that renders to WAV. No DAW. The code is the score. The full album lives here.

Tools for the Ear

• RhymePad: Seeing the Sound — A scratchpad that reads the phonetics of verse and paints the rhyme architecture as you type. Built for poets and rappers; rhyme is music in language.

What the Body Knows

• What the Snare Drum Knew Before I Did — The counterweight to everything above. Twenty years of rudiments, and the knowledge that lives beneath language — the part of music no script can hold.

Heritage

• Understanding Ableton Push — From the analog studio years, when the instruments were hardware and the code was someone else's.

The studio I built between 2012 and 2018 is gone; I sold all of it. What replaced it is a tiny synthesizer, a Python interpreter, and a collaborator that never gets tired of rendering one more take. I don't think the old way was wrong. I think the new way is more honest about what I actually am, which is a programmer who hears things.

Related Themes

• Artificial Intelligence — The collaboration that made it possible.
• Spiritual Practice & Technology — Practice as devotion, in both crafts.
• The "For Humans" Philosophy — Tools that serve the ear, not the spec sheet.