Music21 9.7 Released

Music21 v9.7 is an incremental, but still substantial release focusing mainly on import and export quality and speed. 

• MIDI Lyrics are improved 
• PedalMarks are added (with more to come)
• Substantial new tools for FretBend and other tablature-based work. 
• numpy 2.0–2.2 is now supported, which makes it possible to run music21 on Windows with Python 3.13 without a compiler -- this was the main reason for moving up the release by a month! 

 An update to the CONTRIBUTING guidelines -- all AI contributions must be explicitly mentioned. AI-generated contributions (whether properly declared or suspected) that do not pass tests will be closed without comment -- see Simon Williamson's blog about how AI is shifting the coding burden from programmers to reviewers for context. 

Thanks to @gregchapman-dev, @adhooge, @TimFelixBeyer, @jacobtylerwalls and many others for contributions to code.  And new, special thanks to Anne G. Hamill who has been helping very much with the music21list through some very difficult Google Groups times!

For detailed information, see https://github.com/cuthbertLab/music21/releases/tag/v9.7.0