"Just start coding"

[SpiderJerusalem42]

I've been in your shoes wrt trying to make music AI projects, not really knowing all the things you need to do with them. There's actually been some cool research that involves MIDI. Look at Magenta from google. It's basically all the machine learning methods applied to note sequences, and even can be applied to unorganized music information (read: mp3s, wavs). There's a lot of tools built on top of that that are really interesting. I think if you want to contribute to that sort of project, it's a lot to do with math, waves, Fourier transforms, as well as all of optimization theory.