Sheet music library

python music-notation
Gibbutz picture Gibbutz · Mar 23, 2011 · Viewed 12.2k times · Source

I'm a python hacker looking to build a sheet music app. I'm comfortable with reading/understanding sheet music (played piano for many years). Here are my complete newbie questions..

Is there a standard for representing notes digitally? I don't want to reinvent any wheels.

Given a sequence of notes and durations, is there a library for displaying these in a sheet music format?

Basically I'm looking for a place to get started. I'm not heavily into graphics, so a existing open-source library would be awesome. If none exists in Python, I'm competent at Java/Javascript/C as well.

Thanks

Answer

nmichaels picture nmichaels · Mar 23, 2011

Take a look at lilypond. It uses LaTeX to typeset sheet music. Its input format is simple text, and can be generated pretty easily with Python or whatever.

Abjad is a "Python API for Formalized Score Control" and a wrapper around lilypond, but I haven't used it and so can't vouch for it.

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