ShowScore

Music21 is an excellent library for working with music notation in Python. However, to render sheet music you need to install an external program and configure paths. ShowScore can render scores beautifully, without any dependencies (and faster to boot!). We do this by using OpenSheetMusicDisplay, an open-source music renderer written in JavaScript.

Install

pip install showscore

Usage

from music21 import *

# Your ABC notation as a string
abc_notation = "X:1\nT:My Tune\nM:4/4\nK:C\nCDEF|G2G2|A4|G2F2|E4|"

# Load the ABC notation from the string
score = converter.parse(abc_notation)

from showscore import show
show(score)

Notebook example

Non-Jupyter usage

The music will open in a new browser window if run from a non-jupyter environment (e.g. interactive shell). Or can be specified manually:

# open score in new tab:
show(score, tab=True)

Options

• showscore.backend - currently one of 'canvas' (default) or 'svg'
  • canvas is faster to render and doesn't slow down scrolling
  • svg will (probably) look nicer when printing at high resolutions
  • use showscore.backend = 'svg' to use svg renderer
• show(score, title=True, tab=False)
  • title - false to hide title
  • tab - open in new tab rather than inline

Known bugs

Some corpus pieces give rendering errors. E.g. 'bach/bwv846' has an error in Chrome (but not VSCode). These are bugs in the underlying libraries - and error messages are displayed in red instead of the score.

• There is a known bug with displaying 'TempoExpressions' which can be fixed with the below code.
• If you see anything else please open an Issue

from music21 import corpus
from showscore import show
score = corpus.parse('bach/bwv846')  # Prelude in C

# filter out metronome marks to fix rendering error
for el in score.recurse().getElementsByClass('MetronomeMark'):
    el.activeSite.remove(el)
    
show(score)

Tested in

• VSCode Notebooks
• Jupyter lab