This is a XBMC add-on to generate random waltz theme following Mozart’s Musical Dice Game (Musikalisches Würfelspiel).
Each waltz consist of two parts: a minuet (16 bars of music) and a trio (another 16 bars). Mozart wrote a total of 272 pieces which get randomly combined to produce an unique piece of music every time (originally combination was obtained using dice roll, hence the name)
CREDITS
Python coding: Assen Totin, with little help from some friends 🙂
MIDI processing based on Will Ware’s “MIDI classes and parser in Python”, 2001 – originally published at alt.sources newsgroup, web copy available at Google Groups.
Original score and tables of combination: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
WAV files found at Princeton University’s public FTP
MIDI files originally found at Steven Goodwin’s midilib, further processed to remove unneeded gaps in the beginning of each file which makes concatenation easier.
NOTES
This implementation has two modes of operation:
- Upon run, it will check whether MIDI support is available on the host system
- If MIDI playback is available, MIDI files will be used. Necessary MIDI files are supplied with the add-on.
- If MIDI playback is not available, WAV files will be used instead. Necessary WAV files will be downloaded from the Internet upon the first run.
The rationale behind such approach is the following: while WAV files are compatible with all ports of XBMC, they have the disadvantage of being ~35 MB, which means it takes some time to initially download them. On the other hand, MIDI files are really tiny (all 272 take less than 100 KB), but currently (as of XBMC 10.0 Dharma) MIDI playback requires some user action to set it up (e.g., on Linux one have to manually install a soundfont of approx 100 MB, which not all users decide to do).
INSTALL
The addon is now available through the official XBMC repository. Go to “Music – Add-ons” to install it.
If you insist on using the sources, then move the “plugin.audio.mozart” directory into your “addons” directory.
DOWNLOADS
Download current version: plugin.audio.mozart-0.0.3.zip
Download older versions (of archaeological interest only):
- Version 0.0.1 (no MIDI support, only WAV): plugin.audio.mozart-0.0.1.zip