If you're looking to do some experimentation, you might like to take a look at KeyKit. I used Perl to parse through various text files, setting rules for what letter/word did what, and produced KeyKit readable files.

Okay, that's not terrible clear. Let me try to elaborate.

One of the experiments I did was to take various Shakespeare sonnets and run them through a few rules. Each word was a chord, and each vowel was a letter. Multiple instances of the same vowel produced different octaves. The Perl script produced a file that KeyKit could import and then I could fool around with it in there. And it actually sounded pretty good!

So yeah, KeyKit isn't Perl, but you can use it with Perl to do some neat experimental music stuff and it's really quite a neat little app to play with.

- aijin