1. Overview¶
1.1. What is Musica ?¶
Musica is a free and open source computational music toolkit written in Python covering several topics from music theory, audio analysis to high quality figure generation.
Musica features:
- Music Theory : temperament, pitch, interval, scale
- Audio Analysis
- Spectrum analysis, e.g. Harmonic Power Spectrum to find the pitch
- Database using YAML format
- Instrument database covering usual orchestrations, e.g. classic and jazz music
- Tuning database for string instruments
- Localisation
- handle English and Latin convention
- translation of music therms using gettext
- Score Format
- High Quality Figures : piano keyboard, fretboard etc.
1.2. How does Musica compare to Music21 ?¶
Music21 is an impressive music theory Python package, but it seems to be developed by a research team to perform musicology researches. This aim has a strong implication on the way Music21 was developed.
In comparison Musica has a different audience, since it is not actually designed to do musicology researches. I also have a different background since I have a strong scientific and software development background, rather than an expertise in musicology.
1.4. Going further with Musica¶
The best way to know what you can do with Musica, and to learn it, is to look at the examples:
1.5. Which platforms are supported by Musica ?¶
Musica runs on Linux, Windows 64-bit and Mac OS X.
1.6. How to install Musica ?¶
The procedure to install Musica is described in the Installation Manual.
1.7. Which version of Python is required ?¶
Musica requires Python 3 and the version 3.5 is recommended so as to benefit from the new @ syntax for units.