Making and Playing Music with Google Sheets and Web MIDI API

asepbagja.com

62 points·bepitulaz··9 comments

And here’s some Aphex Twin: https://twitter.com/jvanbalen/status/1382372378051756032

The author here. Cool. Yes, it's a similar experiment. The difference is that you use Python. I guess from your code, it's a CLI application that talk to MIDI devices and read the data from Sheets. Is that correct?

That’s right, it’s a pretty thin layer. Parses the sheet and schedules the midi to be sent to a particular (virtual) device. Having it all in one place sounds a lot more convenient.

As someone who enjoys flow based programming, thinking out the box and shifting the paradigm is what we should be doing.

Using Google sheets to make music might the right interface for some to make music and be creative.

It opens the possibility of taking business plans and making music from them!

With Web Audio API, it would be possible to convert any number inside Sheets as a frequency or note to control the oscillator and effects, and make music. So, yes, a lot of creative possibilities.

This would be good paired with:

https://github.com/flipcoder/textbeat

Neat! And you can use the spreadsheets’ functions to add MIDI effects like scale mode, arpegiattors, etc.

Random idea: hook an LLM up that knows how to write spreadsheet formulas ;)

Good idea to try!

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