Music Informatics at City University, London

Passing on this good information from Tillman Weyde at City University, London:

The City University London is offering 75 Research Studentships to begin in October 2011. The Music Informatics research group in the Department of Computing at City University would particularly
like to encourage PhD applications in the area of Music Computing and Music Informatics.

Research interests in the Music Informatics research group include:

- music information retrieval
- computational musicology
- musical applications of machine learning
- semantic music representation
- systems and user interfaces for music e-learning and music information retrieval

Information about the Music Informatics research group and
the Research Studentship application procedures can be found
online at

http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/organisation/doc/research/mi/

and

http://www.city.ac.uk/research/resdegrees/studentships.html

The closing date for applications is the 31st January 2011.
If you are interested in applying get in touch with Tillman
Weyde (tweyde@uos.de) soon to discuss further details.

Mensural Canons and Other Applications of Stream Transformations

We have a number of powerful Stream transformation methods available now, including transpose() and augmentOrDiminish(). My favorite task with such utilities is creating mensural canons. The example below does just that, using a Bach soprano line as the melodic source.

Further explanation can be found here.

from music21 import *
src = corpus.parse('bach/bwv323.xml')
ex = src.getElementById('Soprano').flatten().notes

s = stream.Score()
for scalar, t in [(1, 'p1'), (2, 'p-5'), (.5, 'p-11'), (1.5, -24)]:
    part = ex.augmentOrDiminish(scalar, inPlace=False)
    part.transpose(t, inPlace=True)
    s.insert(0, part)
s.show()

(Updated 2026-Feb: update links and let example to work with modern music21 -- parse for parseWork, and flatten() for flat.)

New Documentation Chapter on Meters

We have new documentation chapters, with numerous examples and demonstrations, on using and processing time signatures and meter-related data:

User's Guide Chapter 14 and Chapter 55

(Updated 2026-Feb: the previous overviewMeters is gone, but these two Chapters later replaced it).

Meter Objects at ICMC 2010

This week we presented a paper on music21 Meter objects at the 2010 International Computer Music Conference. There were a number of people happy to see an easy-to-use, powerful, object-oriented representation of symbolic musical structures.

The paper can be downloaded at the link below. I will be posting a few examples, and a new documentation tutorial, in the coming days.

https://www.trecento.com/research/Ariza_Cuthbert_Meter_ICMC_2010.pdf

(Updated 2026-Feb with updated links)

Music21 Launch!

Music21 has released its first Alpha for download. The site is up at https://music21.org/. As an alpha release many of the features are not yet enabled and the documentation is not complete, but don't expect it ever to be since we're constantly expanding and developing the code. We plan on keeping the main syntax for Notes, Chords, and Streams exactly as it is -- it's been over two year's worth of work and refinements to get it where it is, and I think you'll be pleased. MusicXML import and export are quite well-developed and most rudimentary Humdrum/Kern support is there. Join the music21 mailing list at Google Groups to give feedback and ask questions.



(Updated 2026-Feb. to update links; original site was web.mit.edu/music21/ and MusicXML site was www.recordare.com/xml.html)