dna2music

The dna2music reads a FASTA file from standard input and outputs an intermediate .txt file which contains sequences of notes, one by line, composed by their location, octave, the note played, velocity, duration and track.

These text files can then converted to MIDI files by the handy txt2mid tool, written in C++ by Jamil Alioui, which I have included in this repository for simplicity and archival reasons.

Building

The project only has two dependencies: g++ and ocaml >= 4.03.0. You need to build txt2mid first:

g++ txt2mid.cpp -o txt2mid

Usage

You can download genomes in FASTA format from the National Institutes of Health's GenBank database, or from the UCSC Genome Browser. After obtaining a FASTA file, you can pipe it into dna2music and redirect the output to a text file and then convert the text file to MIDI:

cat /path/to/file.fasta | ocaml dna2music.ml > file.txt
./txt2mid file.txt
# this will automatically create the MIDI file

dna2music.ml accepts two additional arguments regarding automatically mapping the notes to a certain key, to make the generated notes sound more musical altogether. If no additional argument is supplied key mapping will be skipped.

The first additional argument is the a string containing the key (note) in which the music will be composed, for example C or E are valid keys. To use sharp or flat key use the plus and minus symbols, for example C+ or A-.

The second additional argument is if the scale should be minor or not: true is minor and false is major. You can omit this argument to use the major scale. Other scales are not implemented