music21 VS abjad

I chose Python as a programming language here because, as you could probably guess, there are myriads of libraries in Python for working with music. I found mingus to be the simplest for working with guitar chords and music21 for generating the piano score. It might be possible though to do everything with music21 only, because it's extremely powerful, but I found mixing the two libraries to be easier than implementing the functionality I needed from mingus with music21.

If you are interested in doing anything with Python, be sure to check out Music21, which has a lot of cool features — including doing twelve-tone matrix stuff like this — built-in.

http://web.mit.edu/music21/ Music21 documentation.

It's definitely a viable possiblity, and there's quite a few companeis already doing it. If you want to explore doing it yourself, I'd check out https://web.mit.edu/music21/ and build some basic models using LSTM etc. to have some fun using open source MIDI data sets like https://magenta.tensorflow.org/datasets/maestro .

A little manual, but music21[0] can do the analysis!

[0]: http://web.mit.edu/music21/

There's no universally accepted term for the latter concept that I know of. For example, the music21 music processing library calls the general class that includes notes, chords and rests Music21Objects, and you'd think they'd call them something better if they could.

This Python toolkit has support for analyzing folk tunes. https://web.mit.edu/music21/

(define-public music21 (package ... (build-system python-build-system) (arguments `(#:phases (modify-phases %standard-phases (replace 'check (lambda* (#:key tests? inputs outputs #:allow-other-keys) (when tests? (add-installed-pythonpath inputs outputs) ;; See: https://github.com/cuthbertLab/music21/issues/1164 (invoke "python" "-m" "music21.stream.tests"))))))) ...))

And for the intrepid folks who prefer algorithmic or computer-assisted composition, there's Abjad, a Python-based wrapper around LilyPond.

https://abjad.github.io/

The abjad library looks really interesting, as it basically gives a Python API for Lilypond. It would help me do all the main features I want. However, from the way it does its Lilypond objects, each song would have to output its own PDF. I don't see how I can use something like PyLaTeX to concatenate all those existing PDFs and make nice hyperlinks and indexes for it all.

This could be done in many other ways. Indeed this is not even the standard way (that would be coding a 2to3 fixer). The practical solution is not general (for instance, it does not support nested classes). Also, it has problems with comments (as we lose them in the AST). But, for the practical purpose (patching abjad) it was good enough (You can see the result here.