music21: a Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musical Analysis and Computational Musicology
music21: a Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musical Analysis and Computational Musicology
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 3.12+. (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, v9 on Py3.10, and v10 on Py3.11)
Since v9, music21 has supported at least the last two released versions of Python,
but rarely more. We do, however, try to keep supporting whatever (often older)
version of Python that Google Colab runs on (as of 2026, that is Python 3.12).
See: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/music21list
Please note the required AI declarations there. The world is changing fast, so please review it from time to time for recent changes.
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
[email protected].
Maintainers will respect confidentiality with regard to reports.
The early development of music21 was supported by
the generosity of the Seaver Institute and the
National Endowment for the Humanities, along with support from across MIT.
Music21 is Open-Source Software released under the BSD (3-clause) license. Essentially, it's free and you can do almost anything what it that you'd like as long as you keep the LICENSE file and copyright statements.
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. The
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.
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