Midi manipulation

[Ken Starks]

Massi wrote:
> On 16 Nov, 23:23, Tim Roberts <t... at probo.com> wrote:
>> Massi <massi_... at msn.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi everyone, I'm searching for "something" which allows me to write
>>> scripts which handle midi files. I'm totally a newbie in audio
>>> manipulation, therefore any suggestion or link related to this field
>>> is welcome. Thanks in advance.
>> Google is much faster than this newsgroup.  Search for "python midi
>> library" and the first page gives you a number of good hits.
>>
>> However, there's a lot to manipulating MIDI.  What kinds of things are you
>> hoping to accomplish?  MIDI, for example, is not a particularly good way to
>> store music for composition.
>> --
>> Tim Roberts, t... at probo.com
>> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
> 
> I'm writing a script for didactic musical purpose. As first step I
> need something as simple as possible, for example a library of
> functions which are able to play a certain note, with a given
> instrument and a given length. I thought midi was good for this aim,
> am I wrong?

Oh dear, I'm going to point you away from Python ... but I am not
intending to start a flame war...

The Apache Cocoon project (NOT the latest version 2.2 though) might 
appeal to you:

http://cocoon.zones.apache.org/demos/release/samples/blocks/midi/

quote:
The MIDI block currently gives you an XMidiGenerator to generate an XML 
representation of any MIDI file (called XMidi by its author Peter Loeb). 
There is also the XMidiSerializer to render XMidi back as a MIDI file. I 
have used XSLT to provide some basic musical manipulations such as 
transposition, and inversion. Retrograde is harder, but I shall see what 
I can come up with. Hopefully I shall also add some transformers to 
generate SVG visualisations of the XMidi, starting with normal western 
musical notation.
MIDI Documentation - Documentation available on the Cocoon Wiki.