R-AI-D - Rtificial Audio Intelligence Distrobox

Introduction

R-AI-D is a Distrobox container for algorithmic musical composition and synthesis using the R programming language. The R-AI-D container is a Fedora 44 Linux environment featuring

• A complete R development stack, including the open-source edition of RStudio Desktop, the devtools R package development and documentation suite (Wickham et al. 2026), and the btw package for AI workflow development (Aden-Buie et al. 2026),
• the Ollama framework for using local and cloud models,
• install scripts for the Goose, OpenCode, and Pi open-source command-line coding agents,
• the consonaR package for consonance-based algorithmic composition (Borasky 2026a), and
• the eikosany package for algorithmic composition with xentonal scales (Borasky 2026b).

R-AI-D was developed on Bluefin DX, but should work on any Linux host system supporting Distrobox. On x86_64 systems, an NVIDIA GPU will be detected and used automatically.

The vision

A traditional orchestral composer starts with an idea, a commission or both. Most often they will then sit down at a piano and develop a score. The score will be printed and the parts will be distributed to the musicians for rehearsal, performance, and most likely, recording.

My vision for R-AI-D is different. Instead of a piano, the composer has a workstation, containing or connected to an AI model with the kind of immense database of world music history and theory that today’s large language models have of languages, logical / mathematical reasoning, and computer programming.

And as well as conventional scores, the workstation can generate graphical scores, MIDI files, code in a music programming language like ChucK (Salazar et al. 2014), and even direct digital recordings of the compositions. R-AI-D is intended to be an intelligence amplifier for composers.

Current status

I’ve focused on two facets of experimental music:

• xentonal scales, mostly those developed by Harry Partch (Partch 1979), Erv Wilson (Narushima 2019), and Wendy Carlos (Carlos 1987), and
• consonance-based analysis and synthesis, as developed by William A. Sethares (Sethares 2013).

If that’s the kind of music that interests you, R-AI-D and I are more or less ready. You can open issues for bug reports / feature requests, and if you’ve got a Linux system with a decent amount of RAM, or have the money to subscribe to a cloud model, you can download R-AI-D and run it.

Road map

The immediate road map is:

• Add a comprehensive users’ guide. The two core packages are usable if you’re familiar with the books on which they’re based, but they need much more documentation. And although the operation of the container is relatively simple, the documentation on getting it running and connecting to it needs to be improved.
• Produce a xentonal album. This is going to require expanding the capabilities of both eikosany and consonaR.

Longer term, I want to add more computational music theory, especially counterpoint and geometric / algebraic approaches like (Tymoczko 2010). Both are well-suited to the capabilites of R and AI models, and the databases exist for post-training.

References

Aden-Buie, Garrick, Simon Couch, and Joe Cheng. 2026. Btw: A Toolkit for Connecting r and Large Language Models. https://github.com/posit-dev/btw.

Borasky, M. Edward (Ed). 2026a. consonaR: Consonance-Based Algorithmic Composition. https://algocompsynth.github.io/consonaR/.

Borasky, M. Edward (Ed). 2026b. Eikosany: Algorithmic Composition with Erv Wilson’s Combination Product Sets. https://algocompsynth.github.io/eikosany/.

Carlos, Wendy. 1987. “Tuning: At the Crossroads.” Computer Music Journal 11 (1): 29–43.

Narushima, T. 2019. Microtonality and the Tuning Systems of Erv Wilson. Routledge Studies in Music Theory. Taylor & Francis Limited.

Partch, H. 1979. Genesis of a Music: An Account of a Creative Work, Its Roots, and Its Fulfillments, Second Edition. Hachette Books.

Salazar, S., A. Kapur, G. Wang, and P. Cook. 2014. Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists: Creating Music with ChucK. Manning.

Sethares, W. A. 2013. Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale, Second Edition. Springer London.

Tymoczko, D. 2010. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice. Oxford Studies in Music Theory. Oxford University Press.

Wickham, Hadley, Jim Hester, Winston Chang, and Jennifer Bryan. 2026. Devtools: Tools to Make Developing r Packages Easier. https://devtools.r-lib.org/.