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music21 v9

16 Jun 23:23
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v9.1.0
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music21 v9 Latest
Latest

Music21 v9 (June 2023) is the latest release of music21, a toolkit for computational music research.

Version 9 contains about 600 new commits and features from the version 8 release from September 2022. It is the latest and best release in the industry standard toolkit for doing music research and composition ("traditional" computation and AI/ML) with musical scores.

As a new Version X release, music21 gains a lot of its power with a few non-backwards compatible changes that make the system easier to use, faster, and more up to date. People using music21 in existing environments should read the change logs to make sure their systems work with it before upgrading.

A big change in music21 is that v9 is compatible with Python 3.10 and 3.11 only. The version 9 release will be updated to be compatible with at least Python 3.12 when it is released. Users on Python 3.8 and 3.9 should stick with v8 and those on older versions should look at the README to see what version will be installed for their systems.

Two weeks from the release of version 9 (July 1, 2023), Michael Asato Cuthbert, the lead developer of music21 will take a 6-12-month sabbatical from monitoring the mailing list, answering questions/issues, and merging PRs in order to focus on what he does best and what is best for the community: developing core parts of the system and documenting what already exists. Working with the user community has been amazing, but given that he only has about 10-15 hours per week to devote to the project, it often means deviating from efforts that help a large number of people to instead work through PRs and issues that are important to a smaller community. This news will probably not be welcomed by some, but the results should be better for the larger community.

What's Changed

  • Music21 v9 is for Python 3.10 and 3.11 only and uses tools and speedups only available to those versions. Music21 drops its prior policy of supporting previous 3 versions and now supports the latest 2 versions only (to improve developer experience).
  • Notebook/Jupyter: All pages are now shown on .show(). Compatible with Jupyter 7.0beta and JupyterLab. MIDI improvements (@mscuthbert in #1592)
  • Added to corpus: (1) Queen Liliuokalani’s Aloha Oe, (2) J.R. Johnson’s Lift Every Voice And Sing (3) Vincente Lusitano’s madrigal Allor che Ignuda – part of a larger project to make the music21 corpus more representative.
  • Lots more typing! Use music21 in a modern IDE to see it. Uses Python 3.10 TypeGuards. Add common.classTools.holdsType([‘a’, ‘b’], str) which asserts that everything in a collection has the same type. (@mscuthbert in #1447). converter and corpus are fully typed.
  • Docs! Documentation of equality explained better. braille, corpus, converter much improved. (1) Much better aesthetics and utility @mscuthbert in #1455 and #1452). (2) Add “developerReference/startingOver” – mistakes made in designing music21 that are too late to fix, but the next generation of software should not emulate. (3) add docs about abcFormat support (@mscuthbert in #1484). (4) coreInsert (@mscuthbert in #1549). (5) layout (@mscuthbert in #1554). (6) clercqTemperley (RS100 dataset) format (#1558)
  • RomanText and related formats: (1) Repeats in RT and TSV are improved (@malcolmsailor in #1434, #1435, #1503) (2) anacrusis support (@mscuthbert in #1532) (3) measure numbers on ClercqTemperley (@mscuthbert in #1558)
  • harmony: (1) RomanNumerals and ChordSymbols with front accidentals (flat II, sharp IV, etc.) now take their 7ths, 9ths, etc. from the underlying keys (@mscuthbert w/ thanks to @malcolmsailor in #1439), (2) RomanNumeral’s writeAsChord works properly (@mscuthbert in #1445)
    and (3) transpose properly (@malcolmsailor in #1414). (4) roman.RomanNumeral(2, ‘C’) will now give d-minor, not d-major (@jacobtylerwalls in #1481), (5) preferSecondaryDominants implements V/x (@MarkGotham in #796).
  • MusicXML improvements: (1) TempoText is exported (@gregchapman-dev in #1437)
    (2) harmony/numeral figures are MusicXML 4.0 compatible (@mscuthbert in #1445) (3) Preserve multiple fingerings on chords in musicxml import (@jacobtylerwalls in #1475) (4) Translate "implicit" attribute of MusicXML measures (@jacobtylerwalls in #1493) (5) Synchronize Measure IDs on Musicxml out (@rigaux in #1490) (6) MusicXML sound tag finds metronome marks (@TimFelixBeyer in #1579) (7) Add MusicXML security warning (@mscuthbert in #1584)
  • Speed/Performance improvements on (1) deepcopy (@mscuthbert in #1464) (2) ABC (@mscuthbert in #1461) (3) LanguageDetector (@mscuthbert in #1456) (4) quantize() (@TimFelixBeyer in #1594) (5) use deques instead of pop(0) #1466, (6) searching/MetadataBundles cache in tests (@mscuthbert in #1511)
    (7) findGaps() on gapless streams (@jacobtylerwalls in #1515) (8) ChordSymbols (@jacobtylerwalls in #1527)
  • Braille – add segment.BrailleElementGrouping. Good amount of refactoring. (@mscuthbert in #1495)
  • Converter/Corpus: converter.toData – like .write or .show but gives the raw data as a string or byte by @mscuthbert in #1451
  • Frozen/Immutable objects can be created now; this will allow for creating, for instance, one default 4/4 meter that cannot be changed but used as a default in many places. common.FrozenObject and duration.FrozenDuration (@mscuthbert in #1460)
  • New subConverters register above default subConverters, so it is now possible to develop a subConverter like Greg’s converter21 project that handles a format music21 supports but do it differently or better. (@mscuthbert in #1520)
  • Ornaments/Expressions (all by @gregchapman-dev) – (1) ornament accidentals have a great new system and are aware of their measure and key context (#1545) (2) Mordents get placement like Turn and Trill (#1516) (3) Support for delayed turns (#1533)
  • Spanners: (1) Spanner.fill() – say you’ve set a slur to just include the first and last notes. .fill() will find all the intermediate notes. (@gregchapman-dev in #1486) (2) spanner.SpannerAnchor class allows a spanner to start and stop at a point where there is no other Music21Object at the offset (like a whole note crescendo that begins on beat 2 and ends on beat 3) (@gregchapman-dev in #1479). (3) Guitar: Hammer-on and Pull-off as Spanners (@louisbigo in #1142)
  • Streams – (1) new module stream.tools and stream.tools.removeDuplicates (e.g. keys, clefs, by @MarkGotham in #1454) . (2) stream.makeNotation.saveAccidentalDisplayStatus() context manager for restoring pitches’ accidentalDisplayStatus after a manipulation (like transposition by octave) @gregchapman-dev. (3) stream.makeNotation.makeOrnamentalAccidentals (#1545)
  • Percussion: (1) Implement useful PercussionChord.pitches property (@jacobtylerwalls in #1547), (2) Ignore Unpitched objects in key analysis (@jacobtylerwalls in #1543, (3) Search support (@mscuthbert in #1597)
  • MIDI: (1) Minimize gaps produced by quantization algorithm (@jacobtylerwalls in #1540) (2) fix jupyter/colab MIDI (@mscuthbert in #1565) (3) Increase default MIDI ticksPerQuarter for higher accuracy of tuplets (@TimFelixBeyer in #1577)
  • ABC: set version from I:abc-version information (@mscuthbert in #1589)
  • pitch module gets: isValidAccidentalName, standardizeAccidentalName.

Bug fixes

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Contributors

mscuthbert, rigaux, and 7 other contributors
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music21 v8.3.0

11 May 18:31
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v8.3.0
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music21 v8.3.0

Music21 v8.3 is a maintenance release that fixes a few bugs in romanText/translate (thanks @malcolmsailor) already in v9alpha, but also fixes a change in the Github.io version of music21j that broke .show('midi') inside Jupyter notebooks.

What's Changed

Full Changelog: v8.1.0...v8.3.0

Contributors

mscuthbert and malcolmsailor
Assets 4

music21 v8

19 Sep 10:19
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v8.1.0
b1ea58e
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music21 v8

I'm proud to release v8 of music21, the toolkit for computer-aided music analysis, score manipulation, computational musicology, etc. This release (technically 8.1) builds on 12.5 months of work from v7, and like all new big number releases has a few backwards incompatible changes from before, in exchange for cool new features.

Version 8 supports Python 3.8+, if you need Python 3.7 (such as on Google Colab which is now 3+ Python versions behind) stick to music21 v7. V8 is the first to fully support Python 3.10 and will receive patches to support Python 3.11 in the future. As Python 3.11 is due to be released any day now, keeping with the m21 policy of supporting three versions of Python, music21 v9 (work starts tomorrow!) will support Python 3.9 and above only.

Big Changes

  • The biggest new improvement in v8 is an all new Dublin-Core / MARC based metadata system that allows for encoding a huge amount of information about a score. Look at the new docs for music21.metadata for more information. Thanks to Greg Chapman for the big amount of work on this. (@gregchapman-dev in #1266)
  • Modern installation system, based on Hatch. If you have problems, please let me know -- I expect some growing pains on this.
  • ArpeggioMark and ArpeggioMarkSpanner classes. by @gregchapman-dev in #1337
  • Adding DCML v2 parsing to tsvConverter.py by @malcolmsailor in #1267
  • Explicit Keywords on all music21 objects by @mscuthbert in #1377
  • Continued Major improvements in Typing across music21. by @mscuthbert and @jacobtylerwalls. If you are using a modern IDE, you will find the number of music21-related bugs you create will go down hugely.
  • Ever more docs and more relevant (and diverse examples)

Other changes/fixes since v7.3

Significant Improvements and bugs Fixed from 7.1 to 7.3.3

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yaph, mscuthbert, and 5 other contributors
Assets 5

music21 v8.0.0rc2

19 Sep 07:27
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v8.0.0rc2
a4a640d
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music21 v8.0.0rc2 Pre-release
Pre-release

Music21 v8 Release Candidate

testing a new deploy system.

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Music21 v7.3.3 - Google Colab MIDI

26 Apr 20:26
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v7.3.3
333f2a2
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Music21 v7.3.3 - Google Colab MIDI

Music21 7.3.3 adds support for showing MIDI inside a Google Colaboratory (colab) notebook, via music21j. Since m21 v8 will be Python 3.8+ only, and Google Colab is still on Python 3.7, a back-port to v7 was needed.

7.3.2 was internal development only and not released

7.3.1 fixed a bug that made some installations of v7.3.0 fail, and fully replaced the 7.3.0 branch, which, as Apple would say, is now "unsigned".

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Music21 v7.3

27 Mar 06:19
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v7.3.0
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Music21 v7.3

Music21 version 7.3 is released. This is the second and probably final release on the v7 line. I begin work on version 8 today.

Version 7.3 is a bug-fix, improvement, and maintenance release of music21. Aside from a few obscure corners of the code, it is designed to be fully backwards compatible with the previous v7 releases (7.1). It represents half a year's work since the original v7.1 release.

Thanks go especially to Jacob Tyler Walls who really steered the contributions to this release.

Among the major improvements in this branch are:

  • Full support for Python 3.10.
    • I've been doing all my recent dev on 3.10 taking advantage of new features, and it's great, and plays well with numpy, tensorflow, and so many other cutting edge analysis tools.
    • In keeping with music21's policy of supporting the last three versions of Python, music21 v7.3 will be the last version of music21 to support Python 3.7. A decision on whether 3.8 or 3.9 will be the minimum version for music21 v8 will come later, depending on its release date; we may also update policy somewhat and raise the minimum version to 3.9 during the v8 cycle.
  • MIDI and MusicXML import/export will create and use Unpitched and PercussionChord objects. (slight incompatibility but worth it).
  • The stripTies method's "matchByPitch" setting is improved.
  • Slight incompatibility: 3/8 is default configured to one beat with two sub beats (like 6/8)
  • Lots more typing improvements. mypy is now being run on a subset of the music21 code to ensure that our docs match our work.
  • Individual notes in Chords can be styled more easily and robustly.
  • The tree module is slightly better documented, for anyone who wants to work with insane speed (and complexity)
  • Some superfluous natural signs no longer appear after running makeNotation; makeAccidentals improvements throughout. displayType="never" is now respected.
  • Improvements in instrument names and lookup (Thanks Mark Gotham)
  • Music21 gives better introspection in more developer environments. Music21 now imports its own modules individually. The former way of doing its own imports while "legal" was preventing code analysis on some IDEs.
  • Dissonance score on certain compound intervals has been improved.
  • ChordSymbol constructor has been improved
  • Metronome marks only appear on the top staff of piano and other PartStaff scores. Other superfluous meters and key signatures on various outputs (especially MIDI) have been fixed.
  • Braille exports voices properly; full scores including piano (PartStaff) export to Braille.
  • Ottava objects import better from musicxml
  • Bug fixes on changing RomanNumeral objects, or round-tripping chordFromFigure(romanNumeralFromChord(ch).figure), especially with bracketed alterations and on minor vi/VI/vio and vii/VII/viio
  • GarageBand is now set as the default MIDI player on MacOS. It's a bit of overkill to be sure, but it's the only MIDI player that comes with the system, and to be honest, it sounds really good.
  • More .commonName improvements for enharmonic respellings of common chords.
  • TempoText preserves styles even if the text changes (thanks Greg Chapman)
  • RomanNumerals now treat common ways of inputting suspensions (V54, etc.) as suspensions rather than obscure 11th chords, etc. Note, however, that RomanNumerals are not a fully consistent/comprehensive chord description format, so there will always be some gaps in coverage.

Smaller improvements and features include:

  • Root position Neapolitan chords can be written as "N53"
  • Better support for output on systems where UTF-8 is not the default.
  • Time Signatures export to MIDI
  • Instruments that normally have a certain transposition (Trumpet = Bb, etc.) now respect part parsing of "Trumpet in C"
  • More gaps in streams export to MusicXML as "forward" tags.
  • Braille output supports more technical indications beyond fingerings, such as bowings.
  • Hidden features in chord.tables are now exposed and documented.
    chordReduction (beta) crashes less often.
  • Figured bass input supports notation like "64" (same as RomanNumeral) in addition to the older "6, 4" syntax.
  • Date metadata supports error ranges better.
  • attachIntervalsBetweenStreams is now more robust on subsequent runs if the streams are being edited.
  • Some edge cases of ChordSymbol's with add/subtract/alter/omit have been fixed.
  • A corpus file with an offensive name has been renamed and edited. It came from a bulk import of an existing collection that was never closely scrutinized. There are files in the corpus from minstrel show traditions that would never been added today; however, because so many existing tutorials etc. rely on these files being in the corpus, they have not been removed now. They may be in the future.
  • ChordSymbols with realized durations are exported properly.
  • Up to 2048th notes can now be beamed.
  • getSpannerSites can now take classes.
  • Correct spelling of "bemol" in Spanish.
  • localCorpus.removePath fixed.
  • harmony.NoChord improvements.
  • Faster MIDI import/export
  • Crescendo and Decrescendo wedges have correct and sane id numbers in musicxml output.
  • el.next(activeSiteOnly=True) no longer occasionally finds things in other streams.
  • .show('musicxml') on a single measure is improved (and works well in Finale 27).
  • Users who choose to skip makeNotation on musicxml writing (in general don't!) will have exceptions thrown if notation that cannot appear in musicxml gets through, rather than just corrupt musicxml. This does not affect the 99.9% of us who let music21 change notation to reflect what can be written in a score.

Deprecations:

  • TimeSignature.loadRatio() deprecated. Use TimeSignature.load() [same] or TimeSignature.ratioString = '4/4'
  • Score.flattenParts() -- just iterate over .parts and call flatten() on that.
  • Duration.fill() -- this was a testing routine that got exposed.

Goals for the upcoming v.8 include support for MusicXML 4.0 and SMuFL and better round-tripping between various formats, cleaner typing, improved docs and faster operations. Improved support for IDEs including Jupyter notebook and Colab will also be prioritized.

There are other new features, such as improving OMR post-processing, restoring the web/VexFlow 4.0 connection, etc., but (as people who have proposed major new features on GitHub will be aware), I'm planning on considering the core music21 largely "feature complete" and encouraging people to make external libraries (now that pip + GitHub makes this so much easier) rather than stuffing more into music21. I'd rather focus music21 on being the core system for so much else than putting more into it. I don't plan on removing anything currently in music21 in the next version, but you may find that they're being imported from other libraries instead. This will let the community move at the pace some people there want while letting me guide the core project as 15 years of development on it has taught me.

As ever, music21 would not have been possible without support from the Seaver Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the multinational Digging into Data challenge, and the support of MIT/SHASS/Music & Theater Arts.

(7.3.0 had an installation bug -- replacing with 7.3.1)

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Music21 v7

09 Sep 02:28
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v7.1.0
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Music21 v7

Version 7 (technically 7.1.0) of music21, a toolkit for computational musicology, music theory, composition, etc. is released! A substantial revision and set of improvements for music21 that will make it easier to analyze, explore, and compose music. As with all new major version releases, there are some incompatibilities with earlier versions that should make developers test their own software before upgrading.

Big improvements:

Why type:

myScore.recurse().getElementsByClass(note.Note)

When you can now type:

myScore[note.Note]

Or if you want to find the first Key object in the piece, don't type:

walkure.flat.getElementsByClass(key.Key)[0]

...which will walk through the entire score, even though you just want something at the beginning. You can instead do:

walkure[key.Key].first()

in a millionth of the time. Streams and StreamIterators get the .first() and .last() methods, though only .first() is currently a major speedup. When we figure out how to walk an iterator quickly backwards, though, one day, .last() will also magically become faster.

Making a stream from notes could take a lot of space:

c = note.Note('C')
d = note.Note('D')
m = stream.Measure()
m.append(c)
m.append(d)
p = stream.Part()
p.append(m)

So why not:

c = note.Note('C')
d = note.Note('D')
p = stream.Part(stream.Measure([c, d]))

now if a list of elements are passed into the stream constructor, they are appended one after another, not all inserted at position 0.

If a stream is passed to another Stream's constructor it is put into the Stream itself, not its elements. This was a common mistake in v6 and earlier:

c = note.Note('C')
m = stream.Measure(c)
p = stream.Part(m)
sc = stream.Score(p)

Before, since Streams are list-like, the only thing in the Score would have been the single note C with no parts or measures at all!

In v7, the code above will create a perfectly well-formed score (well, except the lack of TimeSignature, etc., but music21 can figure that out for you.

Oh, and if you put multiple Measures into a Part constructor, they're all appended as they should be. Put put multiple Parts into a Score constructor or multiple Voices into a Measure constructor and they're all at offset 0, like they should be. Smart is better than inflexible.

Because of this change, there's now much more incentive to create proper Part, Measure, etc. objects than just making everything a general Stream.

Streams can now retrieve a single element with recursive search by id:

sc['#myId']

or easily iterate over all elements recursively by group:

for n in sc['.myGroup']: ...

If it looks like CSS querySelectors, it's for a reason. And we're just getting started with showing the power of these elements.

Stream.flat has become Stream.flatten() -- why? (a) it's a verb, and should be a verb. (b) it takes a long time to generate and alters the .sites on the contained notes, so it shouldn't be a property, which implies that it's fast and has no side-effects. (c) it is now no longer shorter and faster to type than Stream.recurse() which is what you want to do 90% of the time anyhow. Stream.flat will stick around for at least 2 more versions, becoming deprecated in v8 or 9 and removed in v9 or 10. I know it's our version of "print(a)" replacing "print a" and it'll take some time to get used to. But it was a mistaken choice in 2008 and it's just as much of a mistake in 2021.

(For .semiFlat, just use Stream.flatten(retainContainers=True) which is much clearer)

New Core Developer: Jacob!

Jacob Tyler Walls has joined the commit/core development group of music21 and can now review your pull requests etc. He has made MAJOR contributions to v7 and it would not be out without him! Please send him your thanks when you use music21. Because he's on the core team now, I won't single out his contributions separately from my own (for the most part. When it's big, I'll say so).

Other substantial improvements

  • I hope you're editing your own files in a modern IDE like PyCharm or VSCode. We've added tons of typing information to help you find bugs before you run.
  • Significant improvement in MIDI Quantization. We still recommend converting MIDI to MusicXML (or Humdrum/MEI/etc.) in a dedicated MIDI processor, but many more MIDI files will work "out of the box" in music21 v7.
  • Go ahead and parse a large piano score from musicxml. But don't go get your customary cup of coffee. Jacob made it very fast now! Lots of speedups!
  • PercussionChords or chords containing a mixture of Note and Unpitched objects are now supported! We're getting much closer to equal support for percussion as for pitched music!
  • Multiple instruments can be in a part now and manipulated and exported to musicxml. This works simultaneously in voices, successively (broken before in musicxml), or overridden on a single note basis with n.storedInstrument.
  • Full support for Python 3.9. Python 3.10 also seems to work with m21v7, but is not officially supported. Official support will come during the v.7 lifecycle unless it requires backward incompatible changes (unlikely). In keeping with music21 policy to support the last three versions of Python, version 7 will be the last version of music21 to support Python 3.7.
  • The representation of many music21 objects has changed and become standardized to give a lot more information (what type of rest is it? What octave is the note in?) This should help with debugging and shouldn't affect anyone unless you are parsing repr() for information. (Don't do that). If you are creating your own Music21Object subclasses define _reprInternal() to return just internal information beyond the class name to get it right.
  • Braille output respects lineLength configurations. Slurs work better too in braille.
    MIDI import comes with measures already made for you!
  • roman.romanNumeralFromChord() recognizes a bunch more chords including all augmented sixth chords in all inversions (except German7 which I can't figure out). And RomanNumeral now takes "It" alone to mean It+6, and same for the others -- it puts them in their most common inversions. To get root-position Aug6 chords, spell out their figures explicitly: It53, Ger7, Fr7, etc.
  • Ornaments now realize with their key contexts. Trills are great.
  • MIDI input now preserves channel and program numbers for MIDI output.
  • Chris Reyes has contributed a formal grammar for TinyNotation which helped us find lots of bugs. Thanks!
  • Write compressed musicxml directly by passing in a filename ending in .mxl.
  • getContextByClass has configuration options that when called on a Stream let them look inside themselves for their own context.
  • Beaming improvements in pickups and incomplete final measures.
  • MusicXML and MIDI files that give a part name like "flute" but no instrument or program code will get a Flute object in music21. It's the least we can do. And if a score sets a MIDI-0 instrument but no part name and only a single staff, it's probably a default value and not a piano, so we just give a generic Instrument object.

Incompatible Changes that might affect casual users:

  • Python 3.6 is no longer supported. Stay with 6.7.1 if you need that.
  • The default extension for musicxml is now .musicxml and not .xml
  • MIDI import comes with measures already made
  • Stream.iter is now Stream.iter() -- the old format will work for one more version. (Most people just do "for el in s" anyhow, so not a big deal.
  • findGaps() now returns Rest objects at the same place as the old Music21Objects. Makes it easier to add them back to the Stream to fill gaps.
  • See above about if you're parsing repr() that representations have changed.
  • n.pitch.accidental = 'sharp' is no longer allowed. Do n.pitch.accidental = pitch.Accidental('sharp') -- this is so that querying n.pitch.accidental afterwards returns the same object.
  • Stream.sorted has become Stream.sorted(), but you probably should never call this anyhow, since all streams are always sorted unless you set .autoSort to False.
  • stripTies() removes retainContainers parameter. They're always retained. Just call .flatten() after stripTies to remove them. MatchByPitch is also True by default now.
  • Before running WindowedAnalysis on a Score, flatten it. (This came from the makeMeasures change)
  • See the changes to instantiating a Stream with a list of elements above.
  • note.SpacerRest() is gone. Use a normalRest with .style.hideObjectOnPrint set to True.
  • ComposerPopularityFeature is gone. It was a fun routine that added the popularity of the composer by googling her or him and returning the log10 of the number of search results. But Google changed their API so it was no longer working. Too bad. (It's not working in v6 either)
  • Dynamics, etc. now use "placement" instead of "positionPlacement"
  • Now that Percussion chords are being used and unpitched objects will appear more often, do not assume that the only things in ".notes" are Notes and Chords. So if you want to call ".pitch" on the object, check that it is a Note, instead of checking that it is not a Chord.

Other improvements and fixes

*Add TempoChangeSpanner with subclasses RitardandoSpanner and AccelerandoSpanner. How these were missed is beyond me!

  • ABC supports more chord formats including better durations (thanks Marian Schultz)
  • Stream.splitAtDurations() now works and can efficiently remove all "complex" durations.
  • A number of places where "coreElementsChanged()" weren't being called now are.
  • NotRest objects all get .pitches attribute, which might be empty. Version 8 will add this to Rest objects as well, which will of course always be empty.
  • Lots of docs typos fixed (thanks Meekohi)
  • Plaintext (non-Regexp) lyric searching had bugs that are fixed
  • Piano Scores can now have independen...
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music21 v6.7.1

24 Feb 03:23
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v6.7.1
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music21 v6.7.1

Maintenance release for v6.7 --

fixes bugs in lyric.search for working with "composite" lyrics, in the export of piano scores with key signatures, and a bug in piano scores and other part staffs that (a) prevented them from being flattened properly and (b) did not allow flattened piano scores to call `.show()

Other changes and improvements are going into the v7 / main branch.

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Music21 v6.7 released

04 Feb 00:47
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v6.7.0
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Music21 v6.7 released

music21 v6.7 is released. This will likely be the last release on the v6 line (more later), which has seen remarkable speed and stability improvements. Here’s what’s new in the past month since 6.5 came out:

  • Important bug fix: if you’ve had trouble loading music21 with an “importlib” error, this is fixed.
  • Composite lyrics changes to the implementation in 6.5: multiple syllables on one note in a single verse (like in Italian, “Il bianco e dolce cigno”) now are imported to MusicXML property, stored in a Lyric.components object, and export to MusicXML properly.
  • Lyrics searching finds all lyrics in all verses (and composite lyrics too)
  • More major improvements to piano staff imports (thanks to Jacob Tyler Walls = JTW)
  • RomanNumeral.isMixture() shows whether a chord is borrowed from the other mode (Mark Gotham)
  • Several improvements in chord symbols (JTW + Alexandre Papadopoulos)
  • More improvements to finding instrument names from MIDI (JTW)
  • Duration marks in chords in ABC import properly (Marian Schultz)
  • Documentation improvements.
  • MusicXML parse failures now more often give the part and measure context (JTW)
  • Substantial bug fixes in Stream.setElementOffset. Adds a new Stream.coreSetElementOffset for the dangerous but super fast version, and makes the original version safer. (JTW)
  • Bug fixes in MEI articulations (heinzer) and accidentals (JTW)
  • Bug fixes in external tools in windows including spaces (JTW)
  • Channels handle better in MIDI (bearpelican)
  • Humdrum files with positioned rests no longer crash (Phil Kirlin)
  • OctaveRepeatingScale and CyclicalScale now usable as abstract classes (JTW)
  • Articulations and expressions musicxml does not support are exported as (JTW)
  • Better support for .musicxml as a file name within compressed .mxl files.
  • Beaming in pickup measures is fixed.
  • Stem directions can now be set automatically to coincide with beam groups. This is very useful if you are creating your own notation from scratch (as in VexFlow output; m21j gets the same routines)
  • Spanner endHeight and startHeight are processed correctly (JTW)
  • NoChord objects (in Chord Symbols) now retain their text (like “N.C.”) in more situations (JTW)
  • All NotRest objects get a .pitches function – a small thing, but will be helpful in the future.

6.7 is likely the last release in version 6. We begin work on version 7 today! This means that most deprecated functions will be removed, to speed up the system and help build new things.

  • Version 7 will require Python 3.7 as a minimum version. Python 3.6 will be end-of-life by November, and v.7 will last for at least into 2022. music21 will continue to support all Python versions that are actively maintained during the expected life of the version. v3.7-3.9 will be supported, and when 3.10 comes out, the next minor version of music21 will support it.

But dropping Py3.6 means some great changes:

  • Many things that are NamedTuples will become dataclasses. (all but sortTuple). This will make working with a lot of data much better.
  • Many many string options (such as notehead and beam types) will become Enums. This will help with avoiding making coding mistakes that are hard to detect. Where this has already happened (like in VoiceLeadingQuartet.MotionType) life has already become better. They will be StringEnums, and have a transition period, so code that checks for Beam.type == “start” or Lyric.syllabic == “begin” will still work (but I can never remember which is start and which is begin. Hence the point!)
  • Substantial changes to Unpitched to make percussion support work.
  • Some OrderedDicts (yuk!) will become normal dictionaries, now that insertion order is guaranteed to be preserved.
  • Whatever else has been annoying me but I haven't been able to fix by committing to keep major versions backwards compatible.
  • For simplifying the life of beginner users, __getattr__ and __dir__ will be defined for certain key modules (like Note) so that all the typing and internal information isn't exposed.
  • I'm hoping that getElementsByClass will be able to specify its return type, at least when called with a class. For people using Typing in Python, this will be a major improvement.

Deprecated functions gone ASAP:

  • Chord.findRoot() -- just use chord.root() instead
  • interval.convertSpecifier – use parseSpecifier instead
  • formats.findFormat (and many others in the formats module etc.)
  • humdrum.parseData, humdrum.parseFile (just use converter.parse)
  • Editorial.misc (just stick it on editorial)
  • Duration.updateQuarterLength (not needed)

New deprecations

  • SpacerRest will become deprecated – just use a normal Rest with hideObjectOnPrint = True
  • Setting a pitch.accidental to a number or string will be deprecated – create an Accidental object first
  • setElementOffset deprecates two keywords: addElement and setActiveSite
  • isClassOrSubclass to be deprecated, use Class in .classSet – WAY faster
  • getClefs to be deprecated – use recurse().getElementsByClass(‘Clef’)
  • getKeySignatures to be deprecated -- use recurse().getElementsByClass(‘KeySignature’)
  • Stream.makeChords() to be deprecated – Chordify is the way to go.
  • Stream.extendDurationsAndGetBoundaries – was meant to be deprecated in 6 and gone in 7. It gets a one version reprieve.
  • stripTies.retainContainers to be deprecated – will always be True. Just call .flat afterwards to not get this.
  • Stream.iter.variants to be deprecated. Just use .getElementsByClass(‘Variant’)
  • tree.toStream.chordified() to be deprecated. It’s the internal guts of Chordify now
  • VoiceLeading.color to be deprecated – set .style.color on notes like any other object

Weird changes of properties to methods:

  • Stream.iter() will be the encouraged new form instead of Stream.iter
  • Stream.sorted() will be encouraged new form instead of Stream.sorted
  • (This might not happen, but...) Stream.flat() encouraged for Stream.flat -- similarly for .semiFlat
  • Other properties where it is possible to encourage method calling will also get this change.

These methods were disguised as properties early on in music21 and it was a bad mistake, leading to lots of problems with introspection. Migration will go like this: v7 -- new forms are allowed and documentation is updated to encourage it. v8 -- all mention of old forms will be removed from the system and where possible using the old form will send a DeprecationWarning. v9 -- old forms are removed.

Version 7 might take until the summer or beyond. (Hence there may be bug-fix versions of v6.7 along the way). So for now, enjoy what’s out there and look forward to the future. Master branch will move to v7 but will remain as stable as possible.

Thanks to the community for great support and as always to the Seaver Institute, National Endowment for the Humanities, and MIT for support of music21.

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Music21 v6.5 released

01 Jan 03:16
@mscuthbert mscuthbert
v6.5.0
9e8d79b
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Music21 v6.5 released

Happy New Year! I am pleased to announce that the newest Version of music21, version 6.5 has been released. It is nearly completely backwards compatible with other v6 releases and runs on Python 3.6–3.8. Music21 is an open-source toolkit for computational music theory and musicology, and also used in composition and music production. Download it via pip with:

pip install --upgrade music21

Version 6.5 adds several important new features since the bug-fix version 6.3 (from mid-November 2020) while squashing many bugs and speeding up a number of parts of the system. Many of the contributions were made by members of the open source community, including major contributions by Jacob Tyler Walls (JTW), Mark Gotham (MG), Néstor Nápoles López (NNL), and Paula Muñoz Lago.

Highlights include:

  • PartStaff objects such as a staff of a piano part now export properly back to MusicXML as one part with <staff> tags. Huge work by JTW!
  • RomanText is now a valid output format in addition to input! Save your analyses for later! Thanks Mark Gotham!
  • search/lyrics now finds second and subsequent lyrics (thanks to Paula ML and DIDONE project)
  • Improvements to VI and VII roman numerals in minor (JTW)
  • MIDI tries to import part names from instruments (JTW)
  • MIDI properly reads and writes conductor tracks (JTW)
  • Doc improvements for many places including RomanNumerals, insertIntoNoteOrChord, chordify with GraceNote (MSC)
  • Major speedups for many chord actions including getLeadingTone, isTriad, isMajorTriad, etc. (NNL + MSC w/ JTW)
  • music21 loads or starts up in 1/3 the time as before. (MSC)
  • Opus.write() improvements -- now all filenames of an Opus write call have similar names and only the last filename is returned (JTW)
  • All properties in music21 are readable without raising an exception. This will help inspection/debugging software. (MSC)
  • Staff-type is imported and exported properly to/from musicxml as the .staffType attribute on layout.StaffLayout objects. .staffLines is now settable on all Stream types (not just Parts) as a shortcut to manipulating layout.StaffLayout().staffLines at the start of the Stream. (MSC)
  • roman.RomanNumeral.isNeapolitan() (MG)

Smaller features and bug fixes:

  • midi.realtime.StreamPlayer now allows for non-blocking playing and for stopping at various points. (antran22)
  • If scratch/temp directory is not writable or does not exist, use backup directories (JTW + Tanchihpin0517 )
  • Use subprocess.run() for launching external tools (JTW)
  • Deprecated method Environment.launch() is removed. (JTW)
  • MusicXML reader selection improved, especially on Windows (MSC)
  • Refactor of the musicxml subpackage for smaller files and more expandability (MSC)
  • Default readers set for Unix (Thomas Wilson).
  • RomanNumeral parsing improvements, esp. for chords like V7b5. (MSC)
  • testing is moved to Github Actions for faster responses. Thanks to Travis-CI for years of support (MSC)
  • works on Python 3.9 -- v6 is likely the last version to support py 3.6. (MSC)
  • Instruments outside of voices are retained when making measures (JTW)
  • all tests pass on Windows for windows developers. (JTW)
  • better installation on conda-forge w/ a webcolors change (JTW)
  • unmeasured scores export to MusicXML better (JTW)
  • MIDI instruments no longer get incorrect durations (JTW)
  • MIDI pitch bends are easier to understand (JTW)
  • Improved tuplet brackets when number is not shown (JTW)
  • Coverage improved (MSC + JTW)
  • Better commonName for 0, 1, 2 note chords, and microtonal chords (MSC)
  • .show('scala') works on more scales. (JTW)
  • More XML Chord symbols import (JTW)
  • Fixes for aadd6 and other chord symbols where the name of the note ("A") is also present in the modifier ("Add") (JTW)
  • Chord.quality returns "other" for C C# E G (MG)
  • An empty degree-alter now matches MusicXML spec (JTW)
  • ABC and MIDI parsing cleanups to make it easier for developers to extend (MSC)
  • Very old musicxml files with empty "tie" elements parse better. (JTW)
  • Improved handling of omitted pitches in RomanNumerals (JTW)
  • instrument.deduplicate() removes duplicate instruments at the same offset in a stream (JTW)
  • Repeat endings with no number displayed now export to musicxml properly (JTW)
  • Several routines such as findGaps were leaving Streams in corrupt states -- fixed (MSC)
  • partitionByInstrument() no longer leaves instruments with non-zero durations (MSC)
  • MuseData reading works properly on zip files created on an OS with different line breaks (MSC)

Thanks always to the Seaver Institute, the NEH, and MIT for support on creating music21.

I'm not sure if the next release will be v7 (with some backwards incompatible changes) or another v6 release (6.7). I do know that better piano support and percussion support are high on my lists. However, I'll be taking a bit of a break from music21 over January at least in order to get other publications out and work with my other projects. Happily, the community engagement with music21 has never been stronger and I'll still be here reviewing Pull Requests and thinking about the next steps!

-- Myke Cuthbert

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