bayz: live coding with Bayesian Program Learning

bayz is a live coding platform that fuses the latest and greatest of Bayesian machine learning with performative music. For more information about the platform itself, check out this post.

Setting up

First, you will need Python >=3.8 (version 3.6 is probably fine, but untested. Anything lower is guaranteed to not work) along with the corresponding pip package manager. Clone the repo and install the required Python packages with

git clone https://github.com/wtong98/bayz.git
cd bayz
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, to train a BPL model, do

python -m bayz.train

which will take a good few minutes to download the corpus, train the models, and save them to disk. Once that finishes, if you'd like to check that your model trained successfully, try generating a short snippet of music

python -m bayz.generate

Note: you may need to configure music21 to use a musicxml reader to view the generated snippet of music. See their tutorial for details.

Live coding itself happens via a jupyter notebook. If you prefer a jupyter plugin via your favorite text editor, a preformmated file has been provided for you in live.py. Otherwise, boot up jupyter notebook

jupyter notebook

and navigate to live.ipynb. Execute the first cell to start a bayz server and load up a band.

The final component is bayz beat, the audio client. Navigate to this publicly hosted client or launch your own instance with www/index.html. Hit start to begin receiving from your local bayz server instance. By default, the client will target localhost:42700, which is also the default port of a bayz server instance.

Note: bayz beat uses WebAudio. Most modern browsers support it (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, Brave, etc.) but Internet Explorer does not. For the best results, I recommend Chrome (or a Chromium-based browser like Brave or Vivaldi).

And now you're all set! Execute the second cell in the jupyter notebook to make your music. Try

b.add_line([60, 63, 67, 70], rhythm=[1,2], instrument='sine')

to play custom notes, or

b.add_player(rhythm=[1], instrument='sine')

to have the machine come up with notes for you.

For more detailed guidelines about making music, check out the blog post.

Play around with different settings. Probe the documentation (especially in bayz/music.py) for new settings to try. Make it your own, and hope you enjoy!