For my piece, transparent, luminscent, I used Python to generate chord progressions that were played electronically that I composed an acoustic part for recorder that was to be performed along with the electronics. I found this process fascinating, but found parts of the process tedious - either taking dictation of the electronics, or printing all the chords and timings to an output, and translating that to notation. I kept thinking to myself, "this is fun, but very time consuming - in a non-compositional way." I thought I could make it better, and more fun.

So, for the next few years, I fiddled around with various ways of connecting what I liked to do in computer music with what I liked to do in notation, not making terribly much progress. I began to explore the back end of software, and ran across MusicXML, an interchange format by the MakeMusic people who are behind Finale. I saw this as a possibility - if I could write MusicXML from my electronic music, I could import that into Finale, and have notated music. Bingo.

Later, while doing my PhD, I produced code that could do this. Py2MusicXML was born! There are similar projects like Abjad and Music21, but Py2MusicXML was mine and I could inflect it in whatever ways I felt. This was exciting.

My dissertation was built around Py2MusicXML, and featured pieces I wrote using the software. Post-defense (concurrent with COVID-19), I've been trying to wrap up the software and make it fully-featured. That's still in progress.

But, for now, you can compose with Py2MusicXML - that is, if you can program in Python. Py2MusicXML contains objects that represent different aspects of notation. So, if Py2MusicXML sounds great to you, give it a shot!