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.
See https://github.com/cuthbertLab/music21/releases/tag/v9.1.0 for a list of all major changes.
There are improvements to Corpus, Typing, DOCS!, RomanText and related formats, RomanNumerals and ChordSymbols, MusicXML (tempo, RN, measures, fingering), Speed improvements throughout, Braille, Converter, Frozen Objects, expanding subconverter, Ornaments, Spanners, Percussion, MIDI import, ABC, and stream tools, along with tons of bug fixes, and a few incompatible changes and deprecations.
I want to give a shoutout to Jacob Walls, Greg Chapman, and new contributor in a big way Tim Felix Beyer for major contributions. Also to Sara Mildenstein and Philippee Rigaux for their first contributions to the code. And to long-time contributors Mark Gothan, Malcolm Sailor, and Louis Bigo, and to everyone who made the system better with discussions here, bug reports, and articles, presentations, and mentions (thanks Carol Willing at PyCon!) of music21. And to the Seaver Institute, NEH, and MIT for making so much possible!
v9 is a major milestone which I hope everyone will enjoy!
Upgrade with
pip3 install --upgrade music21
