Fareed Barakaفريد بركة

Neuro-Sonix

Text-to-music sonification engine

NeuroSonix turns alphabetic text into a full musical composition — pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and harmony — rendered straight to MIDI, to audio, and to a picture of the score. Idea conceived by Khaled Barakeh, developed and implemented by Fareed Baraka.

Rebuilt from the ground up: what began as a handful of hand-glued scripts producing one archival piece is now one real engine, extended to compose, synthesize, and visualize any text on its own.

How It Works

Pipeline

Harmony comes from a hand-authored Markov chain over functional-harmony tendencies, not a trained neural network — now with 7th chords, real cadences at the end of every sentence, and a walking bass line between chords. The audio is rendered by a built-in synthesizer tuned deliberately dreamy: soft-bloom attacks, unison chorus on every voice, notes that stretch into their own silences, a tempo-synced echo, and a large, dark reverb — with the noisier elements (a ticking hi-hat, breath hiss, hard bass drive) pulled back or removed. A finished piece never has to leave the pipeline for a DAW or soundfont.

• Text encoding — the original alphabet-to-pitch rule, unchanged since the first version
• Entropy-driven rhythm — letter rarity sets note length
• Phrase-arc dynamics — sentence-shaped velocity, not flat or random
• Melody-aware Markov harmony — chord choices that listen to the tune above them, with real voice leading between chords
• Extended chords & real cadences — 7ths where the function calls for them, every sentence pulled toward actually landing somewhere at its end
• Walking bass — a held chord hands off to a passing tone approaching the next chord's root, instead of one static note
• Seven-mode scale support — not just major and minor, with chord quality computed correctly for any of them
• Scale modulation — a piece can cycle through several modes sharing one tonic, one per sentence, instead of staying in a single key throughout
• Advanced arrangement — a parallel-harmony countermelody, an arpeggiated chord layer, and a soft sentence-marking chime, staged in across the piece rather than all at once
• A vocal choir — a wordless voice sung on the text's own vowels, given its timbre by a formant filter (fixed resonant bands modeling a vocal tract), independent of the note's own pitch
• Dreamy instrumentation — unison chorus on every voice, rubato-like note stretching, legato phrasing, a tempo-synced echo, and a large dark reverb, with the hi-hat, breath hiss, and hard bass drive of the previous pass pulled back or removed
• Batch automation — sonify a whole folder of text in one command

Try It Yourself

Interactive player

Play either demo piece back with a synced, animated piano roll — the melody, harmony, countermelody, arpeggio, bass, and percussion all moving together, with the source text highlighted letter by letter as it sounds.

A Missing Camera

The original piece, 2024

The composition that proved the concept: a testimony rendered note by note through NeuroSonix's original chromatic encoding.

A Missing Camera — NeuroSonix composition

Manifesto

New demonstration piece · chromatic melody

"Language becomes an instrument..." — a short text about the engine, sonified by the engine, in D minor, fully arranged: melody in blue, Markov-generated harmony in orange with real 7th chords and cadences (roman numerals mark each chord), a parallel-harmony countermelody in violet, an arpeggiated chord layer in gold, a walking bass line in green, and a soft chime marking each new sentence — all staged in gradually rather than playing from the first note, with legato phrasing, rubato-like note stretching, echo, and a large dark reverb giving it a dreamy, unhurried quality.

Manifesto — NeuroSonix composition

Entropy

New demonstration piece · tonal melody

A short text about the engine's own rhythm rule — rare letters ringing longest — sonified by that same rule, and in tonal mode: the melody is snapped onto D minor's scale instead of staying fully chromatic, so it sits fully consonant with the same countermelody, arpeggio, bass, and percussion arrangement as Manifesto.

Entropy — NeuroSonix composition

Modulation

New demonstration piece · scale modulation

"A scale is not a fact, it is a choice of what to leave out..." — six sentences, six different modes sharing the same tonic (D dorian → phrygian → aeolian → mixolydian → lydian → major), the same words landing in a different light each time. Every scale change is marked on the piano roll with a dashed line and its name; the chord letters themselves are computed correctly for whichever mode is active at that moment, not just major and minor.

Modulation — NeuroSonix composition

Explore the Full Project

Code & data

The full engine, its source, and both demonstration pieces are documented on GitHub, alongside the original 2024 prototype.