James Weaver on Quantum Computing and Java

Composing Music in the Cloud at J-Fall 2015

"I see people going to college for 14 years studying to be doctors and lawyers.

I see people getting up at seven-thirty every morning going to work at the drug store to sell Flair pens. 

But the most amazing thing to me is I get paid for doing this."

- Steve Martin in Let's Get Small

 

Readers of this blog, or my other blog entitled CulturedEar, know that I often combine my passions for music and software development.  The most recent example of this is an application named Counterpoint Composer that I developed to demonstrate how to leverage Spring Boot and Cloud Foundry.  I now have the privilege and pleasure to deliver presentations entitled Composing Music in the Cloud about this application and technologies.  The first such presentation was in November 2015 at J-Fall in Ede, Netherlands to a gracious audience of software developers, shown in this video:

 

Here’s the abstract for the presentation: Leveraging the power of Cloud Services, this session demonstrates how music can be analyzed and composed in real-time to augment musical performance with a futuristic instrument. This session contains an introduction to relevant cloud services, and an introduction to music theory and composition. This session also has musical demonstrations and code snippets scattered throughout. 

I hope you enjoy the video!

Regards,

James Weaver

Introducing Counterpoint Composer - powered by Cloud Foundry & Spring Boot

It is hard to write a beautiful song. It is harder to write several individually beautiful songs that, when sung simultaneously, sound as a more beautiful polyphonic whole. The internal structures that create each of the voices separately must contribute to the emergent structure of the polyphony, which in turn must reinforce and comment on the structures of the individual voices. The way that is accomplished in detail is...'counterpoint'.

- John Rahn

As a member of the Pivotal evangelism team, one of my primary activities is to create demo applications and use them as a basis for technical presentations at conferences.  I'd like to share with you the first such demo app, named Counterpoint Composer, located at CounterpointComposer.com

Counterpoint Composer, developed in the Java programming language, leverages rules expressed by composers such as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Johann Joseph Fux in the 16th - 18th centuries to create counterpoint music.  It also builds on the work of Bill Schottstaedt who coded those rules using the SAIL and C programming languages.  As an example of using Counterpoint Composer, here's a two-minute video of creating a counterpoint tune from the melody known as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star:

 

If you're new to counterpoint, a gentle introduction to it is the Species Counterpoint article by Nicholas H. Tollervey

 

Counterpoint Composer application diagram

Here's a high-level diagram of the application:

The user interface of this application is a one-page web app that uses a dynamically embedded music notation component from Noteflight.com.  As shown in the diagram above, this application also includes the following two microservices available via HTTP protocols:

• CounterpointService:  Given a JSON representation of the main melody, initial chord, counterpoint species, and music mode, this service returns a MusicXML representation of the resultant counterpoint composition.
• ChordAnalyzerService:  This service analyzes a set of musical notes to see if they represent a musical chord, returning the name of an identified chord.

Here is an illustration of these services, including how the CounterpointService uses the ChordAnalyzer service:

Getting up to speed with Counterpoint Composer

The best way to get up to speed with Counterpoint Composer is to follow the guidance of the Getting Started tutorial, also available in the app's Help -> Getting Started menu item:

 

 

In addition, the Help -> Technical Presentation menu item contains the slides shown below that give a technical perspective of the application:

 

 

Independently demonstrating the ChordAnalyzerService with the Web MIDI API

The penultimate slide in the deck shown previously contains the following diagram of how the ChordAnalyzerService may be demonstrated with a MIDI keyboard connected to a computer that has a Chrome browser.  Opening the Chord Analyzer Client web app in the browser and playing simultaneous notes on the MIDI keyboard should result in the chords being identified and displayed as shown below:

 

 

Please note that it is best to use the Chrome browser, as that is currently (Nov 2015) the only one that supports the Web MIDI API.  By the way, the innovative instrument in the diagram above is a LinnStrument, which is the current focus of my CulturedEar.com blog, but any conventional MIDI keyboard controller should work as well.

 

Downloading the source code

The microservices described are running in Cloud Foundry at Pivotal Web Services, so the application links above should always be available. The source code is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and may be download from the following GitHub repositories:

• CounterpointService and Counterpoint Composer UI:
   https://github.com/JavaFXpert/counterpoint-service

• ChordAnalyzerService and Chord Analyzer Client:
  https://github.com/JavaFXpert/chord-analyzer-service

 

It is my hope that this application will serve as a resource for music students of all ages, as well as an example of using Spring Boot and Cloud Foundry to develop and deploy cloud native applications.  

Regards,

James Weaver
Developer Evangelist
Pivotal Software
[email protected]
twitter.com/JavaFXpert