midi-viz

• TODO

quickstart

• install the dependencies as usual with leiningen and shadow-cljs
• build the update script in the midi-color-transformer dir with npx shadow-cljs release midi-color-updater
• open cljs and clj repl

disclaimer

• this is a small project used for experimenting with Clojure, ClojureScript, Quil and their interactions to produce generative art
• I wanted to test the feasibility of functional programming for basic graphical computation as an alternative to standard OOP
• it is by no means complete, but I was trying to adhere to idiomatic principles in the languages I was using

introduction

• the application uses both ClojureScript and Clojure to visualize .mid files in a straightforward manner using LCH colorspace
• ClojureScript is utilized in midi-color-transformer directory for processing of MIDI data for example exported by Ableton
• the rationale for using ClojureScript was to be able to leverage the JS libraries tonal for midi parsing and chroma-js for working with lch colorspace
• Clojure is used in main-quil directory, responsible for drawing via Quil, a Processing (P5) wrapper
• The midi files to be translated have to be placed in the midi-color-transformer/midi_files directory
• the app is designed to be used with two REPLs for clj and cljs
• there are three parts:

midi_color_init.cljs

• reads in .mid file, does data transformation, assigns the respective color for a given note and octave and outputs result
• there are some user settings available in the namespace for experimentation
• you have to select the index of the midi file in midi_files you want to translate

midi_viz/main.clj

• this is the main application used for drawing
• it uses the dataset produced in midi_color_init.cljs as a baseline
• you can manipulate lightness, chroma and hue values with the keys q, w, a, s, y and x
• to achieve this, I have to communicate with the JS libraries again, so a subset of data is manipulated by

midi_color_updater.cljs

• a node.js CLI that receives colors vectors from main.clj and increments or decrements certain components of the lch color
• outputs new color vectors that are then displayed