This module explores the prevalence of melodic skips and styles in different styles of music. It builds directly on the techniques covered in the Skips and Steps module. In the previous module, we established that melodic steps are significantly more prevalent than skips in the Kyrie of the Pope Marcellus Mass: While in the previous […]
Tag: music21
Skips and Steps
The module introduces the concept of melodic skips and steps. This module uses the music21 library. Skips and steps refer to the distance, or interval, between two notes in a melody. Most melodies are made up of a combination of steps (short distances or small intervals) and skips (large distances or wide intervals). Many musical […]
Extracting Parts and Melodies
This module explains how to extract a part or melody from an existing piece of music. Rather than manually entering all of the notes of a melody, we can import a musical work into music21 and then return the MIDI note numbers. We can import a work from a file, or from the online music21 […]
Melodies and MIDI Notes
This module describes how to transform a melody into a sequence of MIDI notes using music21. There are many instances in computational analysis when it is useful to represent notes as numeric values. For example, using numbers can be useful for music theoretical analysis, and for performing mathematical operations, such as those common to post-tonal […]
Music21 Installation
This quick tutorial post explains how to install music21, a library of musicological tools for Python. For general instructions on how to install a Python library, see this page. How to install music21 on a Mac. How to install music21 on a PC (Windows). Once you install music21, you can load it in Python with […]