Music21 Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musicology and Musical Analysis
Download

Music21 Ranking & Summary

Music21 Tags

analysis music statistical statistical analysis

Music21 Description

Music21 is a set of tools for helping scholars and other active listeners answer a wide range of questions about music quickly and simply. Although computers have transformed how we listen to, obtain, compose, and notate music, they have not fundamentally changed how we research and analyze music. For instance, melodies can be found if exact matches exist. But melodic variations such as the repetition of a phrase or a change in embellishment are extremely common, yet cause searches to fail. More complex investigations, such as finding all melodies that imply a particular underlying harmony, can barely begin to be created with existing software packages. The lack of relevant software for analyzing music hampers scientific attempts to understand what we listen for and how we process what we hear; these activities are little understood despite music’s nearly universal presence in our daily lives. The software framework, written in Python, manipulates music as a collection of symbolic data, such as pitch names and note durations, that can then be classified as higher level musical structures according to the style, region, or period being studied. Music21 focuses specifically on the manipulation of symbolic music data: it leaves to the many preexisting open-source and proprietary software packages the notation and audio playback of scores (the two areas where computer-aided music research is most developed). By focusing on the points of greatest need to musicology, the framework will give rapid results within a short timeframe.

Music21 Related Software