Is there a way to get the note data from a MIDI file? That is, I want to break down the MIDI file into its constituent parts so they are in the form of a unique word (or any other data type). What I want to do in the end is take in a MIDI file and find patterns in the notes. Get in each note, find it's frequency (of being played) and note how likely other notes are to be played after it.
It would be nice to do this in C/C++, but any language would be fine.
Parsing MIDI files by hand is no fun, take my word on this. ;) The format, although well documented, is difficult to deal with since you are always on the raw byte level. Since you are interested in extracting some meaningful information from MIDI files themselves, I'd recommend using a framework such as Juce, which is written in C++ and has support for reading MIDI files.
Juce is pretty large, but the API is good and well-documented. The class for parsing MIDI files, for instance, is pretty straightforward and easy to use.