Magenta encompasses two goals. It’s first a research project to advance the state-of-the art in music, video, image, and text generation. Second, it's an attempt to build a community of artists, coders, and machine learning researchers. To facilitate those goals, we are developing open-source infrastructure in this repository.

The installation has three components. You are going to need Bazel to build packages, TensorFlow to run models, and an up to date version of this repository.

First, clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/magenta-staging.git

Next, install Bazel and TensorFlow. You can find instructions for the former here and the latter here. After that's done, run the tests with this command:

bazel test magenta/...

Now that you have a working copy of Magenta, let's build your first MIDI dataset. We do this by creating a directory of MIDI files and converting them into NoteSequences. If you don't have any MIDIs handy, you can find some here from MidiWorld.

To run the script, first build it:

bazel build magenta:convert_midi_dir_to_note_sequences

Then run it:

./bazel-bin/magenta/convert_midi_dir_to_note_sequences \
--midi_dir=/path/to/midi/dir \
--output_file=/path/to/tfrecord/file \
--recursive