Modest – musical harmony library for Lua
This is a project I've been building in my spare time over the past few months. It's a library that provides methods for working with musical harmony ‒ intervals, notes, chords. For example, it can parse almost any chord symbol (Fmaj7, CminMaj9, etc) and turn it into notes, or it can identify a chord from a given set of notes. I started this project with the idea of using formal grammar to parse chord symbols. I wanted to use it instead of a hand-written parser, which is the common approach among similar libraries. Lua caught my attention because of Lpeg, a Parsing Expression Grammar library…
Modest – musical harmony library for Lua launched on February 2, 2025 with 76 votes, #428 of 5,999 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Modest is a Lua library for working with musical harmony, including intervals, notes, and chords. It can parse chord symbols like Fmaj7 into their constituent notes and identify chords from given note sets. The library uses formal grammar parsing via Lpeg rather than hand-written parsers. Written in Fennel and designed for audio programming applications, it fills a gap in Lua's music manipulation tools.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
musical harmony library for Lua. Contribute to esbudylin/modest development by creating an account on GitHub.
In the maker’s words, at launch
This is a project I've been building in my spare time over the past few months. It's a library that provides methods for working with musical harmony ‒ intervals, notes, chords. For example, it can parse almost any chord symbol (Fmaj7, CminMaj9, etc) and turn it into notes, or it can identify a chord from a given set…
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