May 9, 2012 9:25 am

Music21 speedups in Chordify and with PyPy

The biggest recurring complaint about using music21 is the speed at working with large scores. I wanted to point out two resources that are available in the latest SVN releases. Both will appear in the next public release, but for some people you might want to try it already:

1. Some parts of chordify move from O(m^2) time to O(m) where m is the number of measures in a part – for very large scores, this will mean a huge speedup. (usually noticeable after about 100 measures)
2. Music21 works with the rewrite of python called PyPy – which is a sped-up version of python 2.7. The only parts that don’t work are plotting algorithms, since matplotlib and numpy aren’t yet ported to pypy. Most operations will see about a halving of the speed – the exception is in parsing files a second and subsequent time (however, the first time is quite a bit faster).

Work on running music21 on multiple systems is proceeding, so we should be able to demonstrate that soon.

Thanks for the patience. My motto is “make it work first, make it faster later.” which I sometimes translate as, “we’ve waited 200 years to have a tool that can analyze thousands of works at once; we can wait another 20 minutes.” but that doesn’t mean we’re not working all the time to make music21 run as fast as we can.

Apr 27, 2012 1:27 pm

Music21 External Overview

R. Michael Winters of McGill University has written up a short summary of some of the uses of music21 on his website. Thanks to R. Michael for his work and the shoutout!

Music21 was also a part of Florence Levé et al.'s work on rhythm extraction on polyphonic music in ISMIR 2011. See the paper here. It also helped enable Patrick Mennen's thesis "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning based on Musical Information". Thanks also to Andrew Hankinson et al. for the shoutout in their paper Creating a large-scale searchable digital collection from printed music materials and to David Lewis et al. in their paper "Tools for Music Scholarship and their Interactions: A Case Study".

We're also thankful for the writeup about music21 by Douglas Mason in his article for the Department of Energy (p. 5) which won a 2011 DOE Emerging Writer Essay award. Douglas will be presenting aspects of music21 for data visualization at SIGGRAPH.

A new version of music21 was recently released. For the first time, regular and noCorpus versions are available (the latter for embedding in systems with low memory space or for fully LGPL'd needs). Download it at Google Code.

Feb 25, 2012 10:11 am

Silly (but fun) little thing

I'm "Sara Does Science"'s "Science Crush Friday" for the week. Includes the wonderful (if fanciful) line "Michael Scott Cuthbert is music’s Indiana Jones" and the description "Not a bad looking guy at all! And he kind of reminds me of Ross from Friends, but the smile makes him seem less neurotic." For the record, I am equally neurotic, just in different ways.

Thanks Sara!

Feb 24, 2012 8:13 am

MIT Tech Article on Michael Cuthbert

Derek Chang of the MIT Tech published an interview with me in today's issue. Read it here. The opening appears below:

$500,000 grant for music research at MIT

Michael Scott Cuthbert, associate professor of music, was recently awarded a $500,000 grant from the Digging into Data consortium. This grant will support his work in using computational techniques to study changes in Western musical style. He has received $175,000 specifically for his music21 project . On Thursday, Cuthbert sat with The Tech to discuss his work with music21 and his passion for combining computational techniques with music.

The Tech: Many of us with a musical background must be interested in your computational work and how it applies to music. What is the motivation behind your project?

Cuthbert: One of the main ways artists analyze art work or music is examining a piece very carefully, from all possible dimensions. But it’s really hard to put the work into the context of the time. How is the piece representative of its time period, or how does it break the mold? It takes us a very long time to look at one piece. In contrast, computers are good at getting an overview of a particular problem. For example, what patterns exist in how chords progress from one to another? Is the piece being looked at representative of the music grammar for the period? (...read more...)

Feb 11, 2012 6:39 pm

music21 Theory Analyzer

The music21 Theory Analyzer, currently under development by the music21 team at MIT, has the potential to transform the way students and teachers approach music theory education. The package provides analysis tools to identify common counterpoint errors, such as parallel fifths and improper resolutions, in a student’s assignment. It can then display the results directly to the student, or send an email to the professor containing the results coupled with an annotated version of the student’s assignment.

In nearly all courses of introductory music theory, students are taught the rules of common-practice contrapuntal composition. In 1725 Johann Joseph Fux published what is often considered the first “textbook” on composition, Gradus ad Parnassum, in which he outlined the many rules of counterpoint according to the Palestrina style. Surprisingly, the approach to teaching music theory has not changed much since its publication. Students learn the rules by reading a textbook, listening to musical excerpts, and studying with their teacher. They are asked to complete written compositional assignments in which they adhere to these strict rules. The teacher then must go through the assignments, checking for each rule. The entire process is fairly laborious and tedious, which can often be discouraging for both student and teacher.

The music21 Theory Analyzer utilizes the python-based music21 toolkit to transform the way students and teachers approach common-practice music theory education. The package pre-grades student assignments by analyzing them for common practice errors, checking the accuracy of textual responses, and returning results to the student’s professor.

The project began at the Boston Music HackDay in November 2011 where a small proof-of-concept music theory checker site was developed. Since then, the project has expanded in functionality and features. The curriculum of the package is specifically tailored to one of the most commonly used books to study music theory, The Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis, published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.