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Authors, Acknowledgments, Contributing, and Licensing

Music21 is an open-source toolkit for Computer-aided musicology. It is licensed under the LGPL (see below).

About the Authors

Michael Cuthbert, the creator of music21, is Assistant Professor of Music at M.I.T. He received his A.B. summa cum laude, A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. Cuthbert spent 2004-05 at the American Academy as a Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies and 2009-10 as Fellow at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. Prior to joining the M.I.T. faculty, Cuthbert was on the faculties of Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges. He has worked extensively on computer-aided musical analysis, fourteenth-century music, and the music of the past forty years. He has published on computer-aided treatment of fragments and palimpsests of the late Middle Ages and on set analysis of Sub-Saharan African Rhythm and the music of John Zorn. In addition to work on music21, Cuthbert is currently writing a book on sacred music in Italy during the age of the Black Death and Great Papal Schism.

Christopher Ariza is Lead Programmer of music21 and Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at M.I.T. Prior to joining the music21 project, Ariza was Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Towson University in Baltimore. He has published and presented numerous articles and papers on algorithmic composition and generative music systems. Ariza received his A.B. degree from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University.

Acknowledgements

Funding

The music21 project was made possible by generous research funding from the Seaver Institute.

In addition, we acknowledge consistent support from M.I.T., the School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, and the Music and Theater Arts section.

Colleagues and Institutions

Music21 is unthinkable without our colleagues and friends working on other music and technology projects, in particular:

Contributors

Additionally, the following individuals have contributed materials or knowledge to this project. They are all greatly appreciated.

  • Donald Byrd, researcher on University of Indiana who created a schema for computer-aided musicology (along with the source of all sorts of examples of how music notation is difficult).
  • Michael Good and Recordare.com for creating MusicXML and many discussions about the project.
  • Margaret Greentree has given permission for distribution of her edited collection of the Bach chorales in MusicXML format as part of the music21 corpus. Her website contains all these chorales in additional formats.
  • Justin London compiled and maintained the list of Second-Viennese row forms now available in serial.py.
  • Craig Sapp has always been generous in discussions about MIR.
  • Bryen Travis gave permission to use his collection of Bach MIDI data in music21.

How to Contribute

We are always interested in working with interested musicologists, programmers, psychologists, composers, game-designers, performers, amateur music enthusiasts, etc. In particular, we’re interested in hearing about how music21 helped you advance your work ... or in problems with music21 itself or contributions you’ve made.

You can contact the larger music21 community through the music21 list, or email the authors (at our last names @mit.edu).

In particular, if you are interested in contributing documentation, tests, or new features to music21, please contact the authors.

Licensing

Music21 is Copyright (c) 2010, the music21 Group (Michael Scott Cuthbert, Principal Investigator). However, it is also free and open-source software. It is licensed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL). The complete license can be found at the following URL:

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html

While you’re legally bound by the rules above, in a nutshell here’s what the LGPL means: You can download music21 for free, give a copy of it to your friends, make your great discovery about Buxtehude or Britney with it and owe us nothing. (Though [sniff, sniff] I’d think a footnote of thanks to music21 in your eventual publication or on your website would be a pretty nice thing to do, no? the authors also enjoy a nice scotch, if you’re feeling really generous). You can even make money off of music21 by making your own projects that use it.

But there are some responsibilities you have: if you alter music21 itself, you must release it under the LGPL license itself (note that we’re bound by the same responsibility!) – meaning your version must also be free and open source. You can link to music21 in your own proprietary closed-source code. So if you want to make money off of a great closed-source software notation package that uses music21, go ahead! But the version of music21 distributed with your software must be editable by users. So if you use music21 to provide sound for a closed-source demonstration, I should be able to hack the version of music21 used by your demo to change the base tuning, etc. In sum: linking to music21 in closed-source applications = good. embedding/altering music21 itself in closed-source apps = illegal.