A few weeks ago, prof Matt Crump wrote a blog post in which he explores tools to handle MIDI data in R, in preparation for a cognition experiment that involves creating musical stimuli. In the article he ends up using a mix of external command line tools ffmpeg and fluidsynth and a python module. This solution of course hurts my R soul: Invoking shell commands from R is unreliable and users are often unable (or unwilling) to install all kinds of extra software on their …