a song that ive been obsessed with recently: aphex twin’s avril 14th. it is beautiful.

as a self-proclaimed creative technologist, i started wondering what this song might look and sound like as code. so i recreated it in strudel repl

i don’t have any background in music theory or composition, so i cheated a bit: i found a MIDI file of the song online and converted it into a JSON file. then i wrote a brief Python script to turn into strudel compatible code.

brief overview of py script:

• grabs all the notes from all tracks and puts them into one list

• picks the first instrument it finds to use as the sample

• sorts all the notes by when they start

• groups notes that start at (almost) the same time into chords

• calculates how long the gaps are between notes or chords

• then turns all that into a list of notes with timing, like @300 to mean “300ms before playing this one”

  
  

the result is a slightly imperfect but still lovely variation of avril 14th. the script generates both the left and right piano hands, and they’re just a tiny bit off from each other but I think it makes it even more pretty.