music21-tools

Tools and demonstrations for music21 created by Cuthbert and his lab (cuthbertLab)

Copyright © 2004-2026 Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert, released under a BSD (3-clause) license.

Many of these tools and demonstrations were formerly in the music21 package.
They may require external packages to make them work, and some may require editing to make them work with the latest version of music21. I will attempt to update them with each new major release of music21, but there is no guarantee that they will work with any development versions along the way.

Many thanks to Christopher Ariza, Beth Hadley, Jordi Bartolomé, Daniel Manesh, Hugh Zabriskie, Jackie Rogoff, Lars Johnson, Varun Ramaswamy, Nina C. Young, Thomas Carr, Jose Cabal-Ugaz, Lisa D. Friedland, Norman Schmidt, and many others who contributed to this project.

Historical notes

Older versions of this repo included bhadley/mrjobaws/, a demonstration of using mrjob to run music21 feature extraction as a Hadoop MapReduce job on Amazon EMR. mrjob has been unmaintained since 2020 and the EMR workflow is no longer practical, so the code has been removed. It can still be found in git history at commit 311cbff under bhadley/mrjobaws/.

Older versions also included webapps/ (formerly music21.webapps), a demonstration of building webserver-based music21 tools. It depended on a version of NoteFlight that has not been available for over ten years, so the code has been removed. It can still be found in git history at commit 311cbff under webapps/. The project is described in:

Cuthbert, Michael Scott, Beth Hadley, Lars Johnson, and Christopher Reyes. "Interoperable Digital Musicology Research via music21 Web Applications," Proceedings of the Joint CLARIN-D/DARIAH Workshop, Service-oriented Architectures (SOAs) for the Humanities: Solutions and Impacts at the Digital Humanities Conference, Hamburg, Germany, July 2012.

PDF available at trecento.com.

Running the tests

uv sync           # one-time: install music21 >= 10 + dev deps
uv run pytest     # full sweep (doctests + Test classes)

A single module:

uv run pytest music21_tools/theoryAnalysis/theoryAnalyzer.py

TestExternal (interactive / display) and TestSlow (full-corpus) classes are skipped by default. Run them one method at a time via unittest:

uv run python -m unittest music21_tools.chant.chant.TestExternal.testSimpleFile

Releasing new versions

Bump the version in pyproject.toml to the new version and then:

trash dist
uv sync
uv build
uv run --with twine twine upload dist/*
git tag vXX.X
git push --tags

Contact

Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert — michael.asato.cuthbert@gmail.com — trecento.com — GitHub: @mscuthbert / cuthbertLab.