music21 10.1.0

A Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musical Analysis and Computational Musicology.

music21

music21 -- A Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musical Analysis and Computational Musicology

Copyright © 2006-2026 Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert

Released under the BSD (3-clause) license. See LICENSE and below.

For more information, visit: https://www.music21.org/music21docs/

To try it out, visit: https://tinyurl.com/m21colab (run all to set up an environment for the latest release)

And to install, see: https://www.music21.org/music21docs/usersGuide/usersGuide_01_installing.html

Music21 runs on Python 3.11+. (Use music21 version 4 on Python 2 or Py3.4, v5 on Py3.5, v6 on Py3.6, v7 on Py3.7, v8 on Py3.8/Py3.9, and v9 on Py3.10)

Documentation

User's Guide

Module Documentation

Mailing list

See: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/music21list

Contributing Guide

Contributing Guide

Community Code of Conduct

Music21 encourages contributions, discussions, and usage from all people interested in music and computers. This encouragement extends to all people regardless of (among other aspects) gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, religion, appearance, veteran status, gender identity, socioeconomic status, or nationality.

Members of the community will strive to be friendly, patient, and welcoming, especially of viewpoints and experiences different from our own. We reject harassment and contributions (in mail, comments, or code) that belittle individuals or groups of people.

We ask all members of the community to be mindful particularly about assumptions of the gender of users (including using correct pronouns in comments and code). We recognize that members sometimes make mistakes and will, in general, accept sincere regrets for such cases. Blatant or repeated violations of the code will result in the removal of the contributor’s participation in the community.

The maintainers of music21 and associated sites will commit themselves to enforcing this code of conduct. Users who notice violations, including instances of abuse, harassment, or otherwise unacceptable behavior are requested to contact [e-mail]. Maintainers will respect confidentiality with regard to reports.

Acknowledgements

The early development of music21 was supported by the generosity of the Seaver Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with MIT's Music and Theater Arts Section and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

License Coverage and Other/Prior Licenses

Music21 is Open-Source Software released under the BSD (3-clause) license. Essentially, it's free and you can do with it what you'd like as long as you keep the LICENSE file and copyright statement.

The license applies to all code files that are new to music21 along with documentation. Externally provided software (including the MIT-licensed Lilypond/MusicXML test Suite) may have other licenses. The encoded musical scores in the corpus have their own copyrights and licenses. They underlying music is believed to be in the public domain in the US, EU, and Canada (and most of the world) and the encodings are also either public domain or used by permission. For those needing a strict BSD-license of all parts of the music21 system, a no-corpus version of music21 is available also on GitHub or from the FreeBSD repo.

(For historical reasons, music21 before v2 can also be used under the LGPL license. Between v1 and 2, all prior contributors were contacted (it was a handful back then) and all agreed to relicense their contributions under the BSD license).

These detailed explanations of the license were moved to this README.md file in 2026 (v10) and out of LICENSE, music21/LICENSE and music21/license.txt in order to make the music21 license more parsable by tooling. The move was not meant to imply any change in the license or your rights or obligations under it.