cuthbertLab/music21

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2570 stars · 453 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

music21 is a Python toolkit for computer-aided musical analysis and computational musicology, providing rich object models for notes, chords, streams, and scores. It reads and writes formats like MusicXML, MIDI, ABC, and MEI, and includes analysis tools, a built-in corpus, and plotting capabilities.

Use cases

• analyze musical scores programmatically in python
• convert between MusicXML, MIDI, and ABC files
• do roman numeral harmonic analysis of a score
• search a corpus of Bach chorales for chord progressions
• parse a MusicXML file and extract pitches and rhythms
• generate music notation from code
• study music theory computationally for research

When to choose

• you need deep symbolic music analysis rather than just playback
• you work with Western notation formats like MusicXML or MIDI in Python
• you're doing musicology research, teaching, or corpus studies
• you want a mature, well-documented library with an active community

When to avoid

• you need real-time audio synthesis or DAW functionality
• you want a graphical notation editor rather than a programming library
• you primarily work with audio waveforms rather than symbolic scores
• you need non-Western notation systems with limited support in music21

Facets

library · maturity active

parser data-visualization nlp sdk developer-tools audio education data-science python cross-platform windows music-analysis musicology musicxml midi score-processing computational-musicology music-theory corpus natural-language-processing macos linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="cuthbertLab/music21")