Sebastian will be a symbolic music analysis and composition library
written in Python.

I partly think of it as being a "Mathematica for music". By symbolic,
I mean that it will focus more on the sorts of abstractions made by
music notation and theories of harmony and counterpoint than lower
level numerical operations that one might use in, say, music synthesis.

I hope it to be very practical as an analysis tool for existing
compositions (especially from the common practice period) and also a
tool for computer-assisted composition. It will also be a bit of a test
bed for ideas I've had for a while around applying linguistics and
abstract algebra to music.

As an initial driver for this attempt at building Sebastian, I'm going
to start by writing software for generating a performance of
Terry Riley's In C. This will provide a nice little project by which
to motivate finishing off my MIDI library, write a parser for lilypond
as I'd like to define the In C patterns (and indeed much in Sebastian)
in that notation.

James Tauber
jtauber@jtauber.com